Customer error experience
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.
What most customers see
Error 7
Something went wrong. Please try again later.
OK
- No idea what happened
- No way to fix it
- No one to ask
What they could see
We couldn’t take your payment
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Or message us on WhatsApp
- Says what went wrong
- Says how to fix it
- Offers a real person
The problem
Your customers are hitting errors you never hear about
Technology doesn’t always work, and that’s okay. What matters is what happens when it doesn’t.
Most unhappy customers never tell you
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.
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, world-leading by the standards of any industry. Then we went after the errors. One of them, “Error7”, was being seen by 50,000 customers every month.
50,000
customers a month saw the same error message
67%
of those who hit it and didn’t contact us left the service
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.
How I work
Find it, fix it, stop it happening again
1
Find
I listen to customer complaints and calls, and use your product as a real customer would, to find where things go wrong in your product, customer journeys and processes.
2
Fix
Put things right for the customers already affected, with service good enough to win back their trust.
3
Prevent
Improve the product, the process and, crucially, the support information, so future customers avoid the error or get a far better experience when it happens.
4
Measure
Put a number on what errors cost you, including the revenue you miss out on, and track the right statistics to show things are getting better.
The error wall
Errors I’ve written up
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My mission
To turn errors and bad experiences into positive ones, through best-in-class customer service.
What I stand for
The customer’s experience is the truth
If a customer says something went wrong, that’s where I start, not with whether they should have done something differently.
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.
Always be polite
To customers, to your team and to everyone working to fix the problem.
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.