Excellence in 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.
The problem
Had an error experience with a product?
Products and services are not perfect. Things go wrong. Sometimes an error appears as a software message; sometimes a product or service simply does not work as the customer expects. How a company handles that experience makes the difference.
Most unhappy customers never tell you
Only 1 in 28 customers who have a problem will tell the company. 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. 67% of customers who have a bad support experience leave.
My mission
To turn errors and bad experiences into positive ones, creating more loyal customers, increasing revenue and reducing costs.
What I do
Customer service improvement done differently
ErrorX takes the customer’s perspective because I actually become the customer.
I experience a company’s customer journey first-hand, identifying where it breaks down, and what actually happens from the customer’s point of view. I then take that real experience inside the organisation and work across Customer Care, Operations and IT to understand why it happened, where the process or system failed, and what needs to change. I do this one problem at a time.
Once an issue is identified, I own it through to resolution, following it through the organisation, challenging assumptions, finding the root cause and helping drive the changes needed to prevent it happening again. The job doesn’t stop when the technical fix is made. I make sure the frontline teams are continually updated with the latest status, known issues and practical workarounds, so the people dealing directly with customers always have the best information available.
I can do this because I’ve spent my career seeing problems from both sides of the fence. I’ve spent a lifetime running a property business where things go wrong almost every day: electricity, broadband, heating, boilers, contractors, suppliers, tenants and everything in between. I’ve experienced first-hand how frustrating it is when something goes wrong and the customer simply wants someone to take ownership and sort it out.
Alongside that, I have 25 years of experience in product management, an engineering background, experience working in a call centre, running a technical support desk, and working as a consultant. I understand the customer experience, but I also understand the systems, processes, technology and people behind it. But most importantly, I’m passionate about people having a good experience when things go wrong. Because things will go wrong. Products fail. Systems fail. People make mistakes. Suppliers let you down. The real measure of a company isn’t whether something goes wrong. It’s what happens next. ErrorX isn’t mystery shopping, and it isn’t traditional customer-service consultancy. It’s an authentic customer experience, taken inside the organisation, owned through to resolution, and turned into lasting improvement. One problem. One owner. One clear path to improvement.
My values
The customer is always right
The customer’s perspective is where I start. If a customer says something went wrong, I listen and work to understand their experience.
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
Products and processes should be continually improved, not launched and forgotten. Each piece of customer feedback is an opportunity to improve. Small improvements add up.
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. Then we investigated the errors customers were seeing. One of them, “Error7”, affected 50,000 customers every month. We identified the root cause and rewrote the error message to explain the problem clearly. We added a link with more detail and practical steps for trying again, plus a phone number and WhatsApp so customers could speak to a person.
50,000
customers a month saw the same error message
7 times
average attempts before customers gave up after seeing the same error
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.