Troubleshooting Satisfaction - Does expecting failure meet expectations?

It’s always worked that way- Where expecting failure meets expectations...

I have been touching a lot on the importance of good communication over the past couple of posts, and along those same lines, I started thinking about customer satisfaction. This touched home with me a while back. The following incident actually happened; the descriptions have been deliberately blurred to maintain anonymity.

I was part of a group that sent a software patch out to fix an issue with an automated report that was not transmitting daily. We tested it, ran it through some test users and finally released to production. Along with the notification to the users that the update had been made, we asked that any issues be called into the help desk. We had a few calls that we quickly addressed, and as the call numbers dropped, we thought we had permanently fixed the problem. A few weeks pass and I am called into an operations meeting where a supervisor is asking me why his people had to go back to manually faxing or emailing the reports.

When we dug into the issue, we found that the sites had been having issues with the program for so long, they did not trust the patch would fix the issue. Most sites the patch worked, some sites had to have it redeployed. And even at the fixed sites, when something did happen, they said “oh well, it's broken again” and just went back to doing it the old manual way.

Since then we have taken steps to proactively follow up with the end users and their management on each new deployment. Our support groups now have more visibility at operational meetings as a result and the communications are flowing much better than before. We have not had a repeat of this fiasco since implementing these changes.

What was the most humbling aspect of this entire situation was that the customers had experienced failure for so long that failure became “normal.” Sadly, this met their expectations, and that is why they did not call their problems into the help desk.

A hard lesson learned….