Are You Mining Your Customer Canaries?

Shortly after I was appointed to run the Australian dialysis business, my sales manager and I visited our largest customer in the country. This customer purchased peritoneal dialysis products, which are used by patients in their home. It was our company's responsibility to deliver these products, so we had a team of customer service reps who contacted patients monthly to arrange the delivery.

The meeting was intended as a get-to-know. However, it turned into an example of the value of customer canaries. Our customer laid out the facts on instances where deliveries were missed, delayed or inaccurate. Obviously, she felt this meeting was the perfect opportunity to impress upon the new leader the poor quality of our delivery service. It appeared to me that this was not the first time she had brought these problems up with the company.

As our customer talked, she started becoming more agitated because the sales manager took a defensive position with comments like: “That couldn’t have happened; our systems wouldn’t allow that. We’ve never had that problem with anyone else. You must be mistaken.” Shortly before our customer completely blew her stack, I interceded and told her that I heard the issues she enumerated and that I would look into it and keep her appraised of our progress. Recognizing that our sales manager and customer bore bad blood, I gave the customer an open invitation to contact me when additional delivery problems arose.

When we returned to the office, I expressed my frustration to the sales manager about her performance with the customer. “Why were you so defensive? Why do you tell our customer she’s wrong and that we don’t mess up our deliveries?” She responded that she really believed our current system could not create these problems. Then she added, “she’s always been a difficult customer and she’s looking for problems to complain about.”

It’s sad how much our customer interactions are influenced by our perspective. From the sales manager’s view this customer was trying to create problems so she could justify bringing in a competitor. That was not my perspective. I saw our customer trying to identify problems we were creating for her and her customer, the patient, so that we could make her job easier by correcting the situation. I felt she was a customer canary, telling us the problems she was experiencing before any other customer.

Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with the term, “Customer canary”. It is a term based on safety steps taken in the mining industry. When miners are working underground, they face many dangers, including asphyxiation. While drilling, they can hit a pocket of noxious gas, which could knock them out and if exposed long enough, kill them.

Since these gases have no odor, miners used to be helpless, until they developed an early warning technique. A caged canary would travel down into the mine with the workers. Because of their size, noxious fumes would affect the canary first. If the bird was laying on the bottom of the cage, the miners knew it was time to exit – fast.

So, what has this got to do with business and marketing practices? Just like the canary in the mine, customer canaries are extremely valuable because they provide early warning about our product or service. If we ignore them, we are almost certainly creating a bigger problem for ourselves since the issue will affect more and more of our customers. Ignore the customer canary at our own peril.

Sometimes product managers get wrapped up in the belief that handling a product complaint is a low priority activity. I agree that this can be a pain because often you are dealing with very upset people. Who likes that? But just because you want to avoid this, doesn’t make it unimportant.

What many product managers fail to understand is that most customers don’t want to complain. Complaining takes effort. Follow-up on the complaints made takes up time that distracts them from their most important tasks. And unfortunately, most customers experience the same defensiveness that my Australian customer received from the sales manager. So, most customers just keep their mouths shut.

Instead, they’ll find a way to get around the problem. In many cases this means they’ll place our equipment in a storage room. Or they’ll make sure that Purchasing orders a competitive disposable product rather than ours. This is called “voting with their feet” and is the reason why so many products fall short of financial goals.

As product manager, it is our responsibility to ensure that the product is working as intended for our customers. Yes, the sales team is usually the first to hear of problems, but it’s nearly impossible to identify the product problem without visiting the customer to gather the information first-hand.

So, embrace your customer canaries. Visit them. Attentive listening to the problem, detailed questioning to understand the root problem and conveying an apology for putting them through the problem are effective techniques to deflate the negative situation. I’ve also found a bonus in dealing with these problems directly. Treating an upset customer in this way and solving their problem makes them a much more loyal customer than just about anything else you could do.

In fact, you may want to go even further with your customer canaries. Set up a group of them and monitor their experiences with the product. Given their propensity to provide quick and honest feedback, you may find you learn and correct a product problem before the masses discover your product's shortfalls.

As for my story, our customer service manager, who had a flair for digital systems, offered to work with the IT department to develop a computerized order and delivery system. During the development, she would often pop into my office and tell me how the old, manual system could make a previously undetected delivery error. And yes, many of the problems our customer identified in my first meeting were caused by problems with the old, manual system. It took us a year to develop and implement the new digital system. After a year of operation our customer satisfaction ratings rose from 60% to 88%. And three years later, our largest customer actively supported the award of a new 5-year contract to our company.

Paying attention to your customer canaries can lead to greater business success.