A customer rang the office today complaining about the VOIP not working and after a bit of talking through, it turned out he wasn’t dialing 0 to get the outside line. Talking with a colleague about this I observed that over the last few weeks there have been glitches with the VOIP server and this has meant that our customers no longer trust it. In the past, someone using our phones would have first questioned themselves when a phone call failed but now, after having experienced glitches, they immediately assume it is the system glitching again. It will take a lot of time for confidence to be restored and in the meantime, we must put up with support calls about finger trouble and the occasional snide comment about how our stuff “never works” and is “buggy” when the reality is there was an issue that proved to have some tenacity so that after it was first fixed, it reoccured days later before we found the real issue that took days to resolve while we rebuilt a few things.

Managing customer perceptions is pretty difficult because human instinct is to pay attention to trouble spots rather than just feeling happy about the good stuff. One way to make it worse is to give in to the frustration and get passive aggressive with the customer: the customer is getting tetchy because their service doesn’t work so you react against that constant criticism of your best efforts.

Most of the time, the customer can’t see us beavering away trying to get things going and don’t know about the fifty other phone calls we just got complaining about the same issue. So one way to improve things is to let the customer know exactly what we’re doing and how much work we are putting in to fix it. The other is to follow up a few times after the issues are resolved to subtly remind the customer that the issue is resolved and very definitely put to bed.

To change tack a bit, people always ask me why I switched from PC to Mac. It’s really hard for me to answer but the way I usually say it is that when I tried the Mac, everything was just so smooth and glitch free. It worked out of the box, it just knew how to figure everything out like connecting to the internet and setting up my account. On my windows laptop, they’d rushed it out the door and the wireless drivers needed to update themselves and for some reason the keyboard went away when the trackpad was used and then the trackpad went haywire. Ask any windows user about their computer and they’ll be able to tell you about some unexplained glitch that annoys them or annoyed them until they reinstalled the operating system and ever since, they have to reboot when they want to burn a second CD or something.

The difference is that Apple is in a position where they have control of the hardware and software and they don’t rush anything out to customers until it has been thoroughly tested and debugged. I bet the testing team at Apple get really bored with just going through the same scenario with fifty variations and I’m sure they automate a lot of it but you can tell the work has been done because the experience is superior.

So when you think about your companies reputation and your own reputation, would you rather have Windows reputation or OSXs? How are you going to achieve that? I put that you are going to pay strict attention to quality and get it right the first time.