The Customer Who Found the Bug

Five-minute address to the annual company meeting — Customer Support Team Lead, to roughly 300 colleagues

Opening

Eleven months ago, at 4:12 on a Tuesday afternoon, a woman named Ruth Okafor called us for the third time in a week. She was not polite. She had tried to order a replacement filter for her water purifier three times, and three times her basket had emptied itself at the final step. Her exact words to my colleague Daniel were: "Your website is a liar."

Daniel could have apologised, offered a discount code, and closed the ticket. That is what the script says. Instead, he asked her one more question: "What did you change on the last screen?"

She had changed her postcode. She had moved house.

That was it. Anyone who edited their delivery address on the payment page, instead of the page before, lost their entire basket. The bug had been live for seven weeks. When Finance ran the numbers, we had lost somewhere around 3,400 orders — close to £180,000 — because of a form field nobody in the building had tested.

An angry customer found it in four minutes. Our monitoring never saw it at all.

The message

So here is the one thing I want you to take out of this room: the fastest way to improve a product is to listen to the people who complain about it.

Not the people who love it. Not the people who fill in the survey and give us a seven out of ten. The people who are furious. Because fury is specific. Nobody phones you to shout about something vague.

Point one: complaints are data

We tend to treat a complaint as a problem to be soothed. I want you to treat it as a measurement.

Every week, Support handles about 1,900 contacts. For the last year we have tagged every one of them against the part of the product it touches. Here is what that told us.

• Checkout generates 14 percent of our contacts but only 3 percent of our traffic. That ratio is a flashing light.
• The "Where is my order" page, which we were proud of, produced 400 complaints in its first month — because the tracking number was shown in grey text that looked disabled. One font change cut those contacts by two-thirds.
• Our most-requested feature in 2024, a saved-basket option, was never mentioned once in a user interview. It appeared 212 times in angry emails.

None of that came from a focus group. It came from people who were annoyed enough to tell us. A complaint is a bug report written by someone who cares, free of charge, with a reproduction step attached. The only cost is that it arrives in capital letters.

Point two: the person who answers should sit next to the person who builds

Data is useless if it lives in a ticketing system that nobody on the product side opens.

In February we ran an experiment. We moved two support agents — Daniel was one of them — to desks in the middle of the checkout engineering team. No process, no dashboard, no weekly report. Just proximity.

Here is what happened. On day three, an engineer overheard Daniel talking a customer through a failing discount code. The engineer leaned over, asked for the code, and had a fix in review before the call ended. Nobody raised a ticket. It took eleven minutes.

In the three months that followed, the checkout team shipped nine fixes that came straight from overheard calls. Checkout complaints fell by 31 percent. The engineers started asking Daniel to sit in on planning. One of them told me, "I used to think our users were stupid. Now I think our error messages are."

The distance between the person who hears the complaint and the person who can fix it is the single biggest delay in our company. Shorten that distance and the product improves at the speed of a conversation, not the speed of a quarterly review.

Close

Let me take you back to Ruth Okafor.

After Daniel found the bug, he did something I did not ask him to do. He called her back a week later, told her it was fixed, and told her it was fixed because of her. She said — and I have the recording — "Well. That's the first time anyone's thanked me for shouting."

She has placed fourteen orders since. She also wrote to us in June to point out that our returns form crashes on an iPad. It did. It doesn't now.

Three hundred of us are in this room. Every one of us, at some point this year, will hear from a Ruth. When you do, I'm asking you not to reach for the discount code first. Ask the one more question. Then walk the answer over to someone who can build.

Because the person shouting at us is usually the person trying hardest to help.

Thank you.