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What steps would you take to handle customer feedback about bugs in features?

A Customer Success person told you that our magical super important tool isnot working on the website, this is a bug! The button is supposed to open up

a new page. But currently, clicking the button does nothing.

i. What are the steps you would take to ensure that this issue gets

resolved quickly

ii. Write out any tickets etc you would use to solve this issue.

iii. Discuss what stakeholders you would talk to and what conversations you would have to have to get this issue resolved.

  • Related to Behavioral
  • For Consumer PM
  Google
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Answers (1)
  1. Describe the situation
    As reported by the customer success person, an issue has occurred in the live website where the primary button of the magical tool is not functioning as it was supposed to do, ie. open a new page on button click
  2. Ask Clarifying question
    In order to have a deeper understanding of the issue, I would ask the customer success person some clarifying questions like

    1. Is the button functionality broken for all website users or only a certain segment has reported this issue
    2. Is the button functionality broken on all browsers supported by our website
    3. Do we have additive information passed by the customer(s) to us that might help in deciphering the issue faster
    4. Any estimate of the time since when the bug is active on the website

      Assuming, I got following answers from the customer success person:

      1. Functionality is broken for all the website customers
      2. Although I am not sure but seems like functionality is broken on most modern browsers
      3. No, we don’t have any other additive information
      4. Yes, the tool is now down from more than 48 hours
  3. Identify the user groups
    1. Website Customers, who are feeling frustated and confused on sudden broken functionality of the super important magical tool
    2. Customer success/sales team members, who are currently taking the heat from the frustated customers
  4. Prioritze the user group
    I would like to focus on the website customers as the priority user group
  5. Identifying the pain points of the selected user group
    Before deep diving into the pain points, it is important to look at steps of a possible customer journey

    1. Customer wants to accomplish an imortant job via the magical tool and finds no headups notifcation that the tool functionality is broken
    2. Customer clicks on the tool button a few times and reloads the website page multiple times in confusion thinking it might work
    3. Feeling frustated, the customer looks for customer support details on the website and registers a complaint
    4. If the customer doesn’t receives a satisfactory reponse from the website company, she might defame the customer service of the website by posting about the issue publicly on social handles
  6. Prioritize the pain points
    1. No prior intimation of broken functionality is available on the website tool page
    2. No satisfactory response is received by the customer on why is the button not functional and when will this issue be fixed
  7. Listing Solutions
    I will take following steps to fix the issue at the earliest

    1. Take a download from the customer succes team and setup a quick meeting with QA lead to validate the bug
    2. Post validation, I will send an intimation email to internal stakeholders(i.e QA lead, Engineering Lead, Sales Lead, concerned senior managers) about the criticality of the issue and what are we doing about it
    3. Next, I will setup a joint meeting with the QA lead and Engineering lead.We will brainstorm the possible reasons which could have caused the bug and and try to get an estimate on how much effort and time will be required to fix the issue at the earliest. Few possible reasons could be
      1. We recently updated our website which somehow triggered the bug
      2. The consumer upgraded the browser to new versions, which is not supported by our website
      3. There might be a server upgrade which might have triggered the issue
    4. I will also send an appology email to all the affected customers stating
      1. What is the issue and what are the reason(s) that caused it
      2. What are we doing as a team to fix the issue and stop such future issues
      3. Estimated time taken to fix the issue
    5. Request the engineering team to make a hot fix for fixing the issue and meanwhile if possible deploy a notification banner on the website stating that tool is temporarily under maintenance and should be available for reuse very soon
  8. Success Metrics
    Following will be the measure of our efforts

    1. Reduction in number of complaints getting registered
    2. Getting positive and motivating reponse to our issue intimation email could also be counted as a success