Excellence in error experience
ErrorX: Turning Errors into positive experiences
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 make it a better experience for the next customer.
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 the error experience when a customer contacts them makes all the difference.
1 in 28
customers who have a problem will tell the company. They don’t call or email. They might try again, give up and quietly take their business elsewhere, so the problem stays invisible.
67%
67% of customer who have bad customer service experience will leave
10%
customers who had problem but it is handled well go on becoming more loyal customers spending 10% more
My mission
To turn error experiences into positive ones, creating more loyal customers, increasing revenue and reducing costs.
What I do
Customer Experience 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 a 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 always right: Every customer is different, has a different context and different perspective. Listening to customer is invaluable in seeing the same underlying problems from different angles and providing the individual resolution for that customer.
Details matter
Small details can make a signifcant difference to a process, document. It can be the difference between wheather a customer needs to make contact or not and how they feel about the company
My goof, your gain
When something has gone wrong, the customer should come out of it better than before they had the problem. Customers who take the time to tell a company about a problem provide a valuable learning opportunity.
The sum of marginal gains
Products and processes should be continually improved, not launched and forgotten. lots of small improvements can add up to much bigger improvement. Kaisen
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. Customers were trying seven times, each time seeing a poorly worded error message. We 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 if they wanted. Then we went to find the root cuase of the error … caused by a completely different process which was compounded by wrong information in the contact channels.
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 and learning. Let’s find out what that could be worth to your business.