Customer error experience

ErrorX: Excellence in Error Experience

Every business gets things wrong sometimes. What happens next decides whether a customer leaves quietly or stays for years. I help you find those moments, fix them and turn them into loyalty.

What most customers see

Error 7

Something went wrong. Please try again later.

OK

  • No idea what happened
  • No way to fix it
  • No one to ask

What they could see

We couldn’t take your payment

The card ending 4821 expired in August. Update your card and we’ll try again straight away. Nothing else on your account has changed. c

Update card

  • Says what went wrong
  • Says how to fix it
  • Offers a real person

The problem

Your customers are hitting errors you never hear about

Technology doesn’t always work, and that’s okay. What matters is what happens when it doesn’t.

Most unhappy customers never tell you

They don’t call or email. They try again, give up and quietly take their business elsewhere, so the problem stays invisible.

The error message doesn’t help

A code, a random number or “please try again later”. How much later? No explanation, no fix and no way to reach a person.

Support can’t stop it happening again

The customers who do get through often reach staff measured on the wrong things, who can’t fix the cause. So the next customer goes through the same thing.

How I work

Find it, fix it, stop it happening again

1

Find

I listen to customer complaints and calls, and use your product as a real customer would, to find where things go wrong in your product, customer journeys and processes.

2

Fix

Put things right for the customers already affected, with service good enough to win back their trust.

3

Prevent

Improve the product, the process and, crucially, the support information, so future customers avoid the error or get a far better experience when it happens.

4

Measure

Put a number on what errors cost you, including the revenue you miss out on, and track the right statistics to show things are getting better.

My mission

To turn errors and bad experiences into positive ones, leading more loyal customers, increased revenue, reduced cost.

The customer is always right

The customer is always right or rather the customers perspective is alwasy rights/ If a customer says something went wrong, it has, that’s where I start.

Details matter

The exact words in an error message, the seconds on hold, the next step you give. Small details decide how a customer feels.

My goof, your gain

When a business gets something wrong, the customer should come out of it better off than before.

The sum of marginal gains

To customers, to your team and to everyone working to fix the problem.

Case study

One error message. 50,000 customers a month.

As the product manager responsible for a multi-million-pound revenue line, I set out to make my product best in class. That started with listening to customer calls myself.

First we got the basics right in the call centre: calls were answered in 12 seconds on average, world-leading by the standards of any industry. Then we went after the errors seen by customers. One of them, “Error7”, was being seen by 50,000 customers every month. We route cuased why this error was being generated. we changed the wording on the error message to explain the error breifly , a link with more detailed information about and how the customer could try again and not experience the error, we added a contact phone number and whatsapp for customers to speak to a human,

50,000

customers a month saw the same error message

7 times

average number of times customers tried getting the same error before giving up

100%

of the customers we helped stayed

12s

average time to answer a customer call

An error isn’t a reason for a customer to leave. Handled well, it’s a reason to stay.

Errors are costing you customers right now

Better error handling keeps the customers you’re losing without knowing it, and turns problems into loyalty. Let’s find out what that could be worth to your business?