The Case of the Missing Voice of the Customer

Nothing ever happens on a Tuesday, or so I thought, but that Tuesday had different plans for me.

My name is Jeff. I’m a product manager.

For all the sunny Tuesdays in San Diego, this one was shaping to be more of the same: reviewing my roadmap, working on a presentation for a tradeshow, and working with the lone developer left on my team. The rest of them had been re-provisioned on a big prototype to pull in a new whale of a customer.

Just as I sat back in my chair, the phone rang.

It was my CEO.

Luck is a funny thing. Good luck. Bad luck. One or the other is always on its way back around to you.

“Jeff, we’ve got a problem.”

That’s never a good way to start a conversation with your boss’ boss’ boss, but I figure, how bad could it really be?

It turns out one of our big loyal customers wasn’t happy with the software platform I was responsible for. “They weren’t getting the value that they expected. Right now they’re talking about not renewing. I told them you’d work it out with them. Figure it out and let me know where we lost the Voice of the Customer.”

That could be anything, but I’ve got nothing more important to do, so I get their number and give them a call. We work out a time to talk in depth.

When we meet, five of them show up; they’ve got an average of 20 years on the job. There’s one of me. I’m the new guy. The usual odds.

They’re insurance auditors, so I know they’re going to play it by the numbers.

“Your platform is supposed to save us time, but we’re spending even more time doing manual work.”

I think for a quick second and then do the worst thing possible: I start hitting them up with solutions. Maybe they need some additional training.

Of all the bad moves that I’ve ever made, that was in the Top 3 and they let me know it.

When you’re a product manager, it’s never personal, but in the moment, sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.

All out of answers. I start using my head and doing what has gotten me out of tougher jams: Asking questions.

“What does success look like to you?”

They take a quick second and start firing back.

It all comes out.

How they have a book of rules to go to that explains how estimates should be reviewed. It’s the book that they’re trained on, but they know all the shortcuts. All of the places where there is wiggle room come out, as well as all of the combinations of situations that aren’t in any book that make an estimate pass or fail in 5 seconds.

We start running through scenarios.

After a half dozen rule changes, I’m picking up what they’re putting down.

“I see what’s going on,” I tell them. “Do you think you can give me 3 days to work out how to figure this thing out?”

They’d gladly give me a week, and so off I go.

One thing I haven’t told you. I play by the numbers as well. I’ve got a black belt in pivot tables, and I’m not afraid to use it.

I get to work with my partner, Excel. Together we paint a different picture of What-If scenarios and auditing rules that play by the auditor’s unwritten book. When we all get together again, we work over the phone, making refinements.

I ask them what they think.

The five of them huddle, and when they come back, they thank me and tell me that it’s going to be all right.

“I still want to check back,” I tell them. “How does two weeks sound?”

They’re amenable.

I let them know I’ll be watching from my side as well and that I’m only a phone call away.

When you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, time sure has a leisurely way about it.

I call them up, and they’re waiting for me. I already have a feeling it’s going to be good news. Most of the estimates are being automatically passed or failed, meaning fewer hours manually plugging through estimates on a Friday before a long weekend for them.

“You did it!” is the general consensus from their side. I assure them that whatever “it” is, we did it together.

We look at the numbers together: 8 hours saved per auditor per week. That’s a day by anyone’s calendar.

Twenty percent of their week recovered just like that. Downstream, that translates to satisfied shops that weren’t waiting to figure out if they could start a repair and shop customers, not worrying about whether their estimates were going to be paid out.

The customer got their solution. We got our renewal. And I had a great new story to tell in my presentation. We’d eventually build that feature back into the product.

And the Missing Voice of the Customer?

We found it. It wasn’t brought together by fancy technology or learned in anything they teach you in school. It was right there all along on a phone call learning about how each other works.

What happened next, you might ask?

They don’t throw parades for guys like us. The auditors went back to their jobs, but took that extra day each week and visited the shops that really needed extra training and support.

As for Excel and me, we were rewarded with bigger cases to solve.

If there’s a moral to the story, it’s just be honest, to yourself and your customer, and always, every single time, ask the question.

If you're reading this because something in your own product or team is stuck, that's usually where I come in. I work with founders whose product exists, but the revenue doesn't. The first step is always a conversation, not a contract.

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