Customer Obsession Flashcards
Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
Tell me about a time you obsessed over giving very high-quality service to a customer
Situation:
This goes back to the time when I was working as Development Lead for the CPA exam software. CPA certification owned by AICPA globally. This is a high-stake exam students and professionals pay around $3000 to get certified. AICPA is a multi million dollar company, Its a global business and it has headquarters in the USA. AICPA uses prometric to distribute this exam globally in 5 regions and 130 country’s test centers. Daily around 3000 candidates appear for the CPA exam.
The exam used to crash randomly. In exam comments I used to read comments of candidates about exam crashes. Also I used to hear in retrospective meetings that we had over 10% crash rate in exams. My customer was having a monetary loss because of this issue.
Task
I decided to find out how I can reduce the crash rate.
Actions
I started checking and filtering comments of candidates and found 2% of crashes are happening due to not being able to slow loading of the testlet and not being able to meet given SLA of 90 sec.
There was one business story on a testlet I was working on. so I decided to analyze the Testlet crash issue along with my regular story and come up with a fix.
I had similarly fixed many site loading issues in my past companies and I was able to successfully find the cause of the load issue and was able to fix this testlet load issue along with the story work. Delivered it on time.
Results
The QA team tested my fix and found the testlet crash issue was almost removed. When I communicated this to the product owner, director of project delivery they were all satisfied. Later on this fix was released in production globally. We were able to save a 2-3% crash rate that was around $6M (AICPA revenue $360M dollar 1% is approximately $3M) dollar saving to our customer business and a few million dollar saving for our stakeholders like Prometric and NASBA.In comments I used to see positive comments on testlet load time reduced to 30 seconds from 80-90 seconds.
Can you describe a difficult interaction you’ve had with a customer?
Situation
Initially, few customers reported that exhibits are not showing and candidates are not able to proceed on exam. Product owners were solving big issues so they were not considering It. However, during 5/21 to 7/21 the complaint went upto 40 candidates who reported the same issue. Business had already lost around $120,000 (40 candidates x $3000 fees). Exam crash was expected to grow to more since we had another 100 test centers scheduled for exams. So it will be around $10M( 1 test center gives approximately AICPA $100,000 revenue per day; 100 centers x $100,000 revenue = $10M net revenue) dollars revenue risk.
In one of our scrum meetings, the Product owner said Business owners wanted to stop the exam within 3 days if we could not solve it. My VP of software development was unhappy and it was a big pressure on me to find some solution and again talk to business with a positive response.
Task
I took this task to find out the solution to this problem and make our product owner happy and keep their business.
Actions
No data in the log files
Analyzed patterns in log
Simulated the network bandwidth able to reproduce the issue.
Applied fix that was tested and working fine
Result
My fixed code was deployed to current test centers where exams were failing and they all worked well. Then the fix was further deployed to another 100 scheduled test centers. Every test center exam failure impacts our stakeholder revenue as well. With this fix I was able to protect my client’s 10 M dollars (100,000 per test center * 100 test centers = $10 M) of aicpa and a couple of M dollars for prometric and NASBA.
Can you provide an example of when you asked a customer for feedback? How did you use that feedback to drive innovation or improvement?
Situation
Once In our retrospective meeting, I asked our product owner to share some of their feedback. And one of my product owners shared his concern about the time we are taking for grooming meetings. Our grooming and planning meetings were supposed to finish by 2 ½ hours however it used to take the whole day to finish grooming meetings. There used to be 13 people ( 6 developers, 2 product owners, 3 QA people, 1 VP of software Development and 1 director of project delivery ) in the meeting.
Task
My role was sr. software architect, I decided to fix this grooming meeting timing issue.
Actions
I took meeting and spoke with team came to know they were not well trained how to estimate points in grooming
Team was also not asking the right kind of questions and indulge themself in how questions that business had nothing to do with.
I conducted a workshop and established a benchmark for the team to understand what 1 point means and how to give estimations. I also explained to them to ask What and Why questions to help business to groom the story.
Result
Our grooming meetings are finishing before time and some time exactly on time. My team is more confident and asks the right type of questions. Businesses were able to save their time. And I could save their $45,000 (15 people x 3 Hours x $1000 avg cost) every week. Product owners, My development team including QA put a lot of appreciation for the leadership I demonstrated.
Have you ever refused to indulge an unreasonable request from a customer?
Situation
This goes to the time when I was sr. software architect. Our customer was migrating applications into the cloud. They had an Item authoring application where the author used update questions, update status and assign classifications all in one window with multiple tabs and they wanted the same behavior while re-architecting for cloud migration. They had another issue going on that multiple authors were not able to work on the same item.
Task
I referred to implementing the 3 tabs on the same window and single save button.
Actions
Since our customer wanted the ability to multiple authors work at the same Item also they could edit either tab independently.
I decided to create 3 isolated services (question editor, inventory and classifications). Provided them 3 independent pages to save independently all 3 parts of an item.
I created a demo, presented the solution to our product owner, vp of software development and they found this more useful.
Results
Authors were more productive since they were able to use multi monitors
Multiple authors were able to work at the same time.
Our application become more modulare and service oriented
We were able to migrate to the cloud by creating functions for each service in the cloud and got scalability and reliability .
Tell me about a time when you went above and beyond the call of duty for a customer. Why did you take the action you did? What was the outcome?
Situation
This goes back to the time when I was working as a Software developer. AICPA has released drivers to 20 new test centers. One day I was at the office around 6PM. I received an email from one of our test centers from Guam ( there time was 8 AM). That lab had issues; they were not able to launch the exam at all. They had 20 candidates scheduled for an exam in the same lab. I was about to leave my office. My product owners left the office and my manager was out of the country. She was on leave.
Task
I decided to stay late and work on this lab issue.
Actions
I called my manager and she was not reachable, then I spoke to my product owner and got permission to proceed on the fix.
I went on video call with the lab and investigated the issue. Spent around half an hour and were able to resolve the issue.
Then I applied the fix in the source code such that it will make our code future proof.
Results
On that day 20 candidates successfully appeared for the exam.
The fix was deployed to rest 19 labs and they were protected.
Our CTO send me appreciation notes and I was able to save millions of dollar revenue (1 test center $100k revenue could help 20 labs to deliver business 20x100,000 = $2M dollar)
Both stakeholders’ prometric and NASBA (National Association of State Boards of Accountancy) revenue was protected.
Tell me about a time when you predicted your customer’s needs?
Situation
This goes back to the time when I was working as Development lead and My customer used to have new items authored. They used to send these new Items exams to universities to validate the question and receive feedback. There were 100s of universities and every quarter our business used to do this Field Test event. Business used to dedicate 5 developers and 5 operational people every time this event went for 10 days. Customers used to maintain excel with university names and create reports and update excel for university names, event date etc. Many times we used to mess up excel and lose some important data.
Task
I decided to give some solution to the customer that will solve this problem
Actions
I invited product owners and discussed with them to learn what data they use for reporting purposes.
I created one demo web application to do CRUD operation on university events. Like create, update, delete.
As soon as a university event is scheduled or any update happens I propose to send the data to azure data lake. That gave customers the opportunity to create various kinds of reports.
Results
This field test system application was a great success and it is used in production now.
Businesses used to only put 1 developer, 1 QA only to support field test events and businesses were able to view reports on their own.
I was able to save 8 person costs for business, which was around $80,000 every quarter.
