{"id":1191,"date":"2014-06-13T09:12:25","date_gmt":"2014-06-13T09:12:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/bharry\/2014\/06\/13\/are-customers-a-bag-of-sand\/"},"modified":"2024-03-19T15:17:01","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T22:17:01","slug":"are-customers-a-bag-of-sand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/are-customers-a-bag-of-sand\/","title":{"rendered":"Are customers a bag of sand?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I sometimes use an analogy to a bag of sand.\u00a0 I use it to refer to treating something in the aggregate.\u00a0 Each grain of sand can be inspected for mineral content, density, porosity, size, color, etc. but usually we just talk about how much of it there is.\u00a0 In software people sometimes use a similar technique to deal with customers, resources (oh, I mean people \"Image<\/a>), schedules, etc.\u00a0 Treating things in the aggregate is sometimes necessary but never forget what you are losing in doing so.<\/p>\n

Today I am excited.\u00a0 Maybe sometimes I\u2019m excited by small things, but, none-the-less, I am excited.\u00a0 Some months ago, I wrote a post on measuring the quality of a service<\/a> where I tried to articulate a customer focused view of quality.\u00a0 For the last couple of years I\u2019ve had a \u201cnorth star\u201d of building a great way of measuring the quality of the experience our customers have on a customer by customer basis \u2013 rather than treating the customers as a \u201cbag of sand\u201d and only looking at the health of the overall service.\u00a0 We\u2019ve been gradually making progress on that journey and today is a milestone.<\/p>\n

Now for a brief aside before I continue\u2026<\/p>\n

9 months or so ago, we created something we call the \u201cTop Customer\u201d program for Visual Studio Online.\u00a0 We measure activity in the service and identify the top N customers as defined by # of active users, depth of usage, etc.\u00a0 We then offer this set of customers participation in the Top Customer program \u2013 some accept and some don\u2019t respond.\u00a0 It\u2019s all good.\u00a0 The benefits of the program for the customer include a direct contact in the product group to help with any issues they experience, early access to new features (think kind of like traditional Beta programs), etc.\u00a0 The benefit for us is that we get feedback on important decisions and early features before we roll them out broadly.<\/p>\n

Now, back to the story on quality of service\u2026<\/p>\n

We recently (like within the last week) actually produced a quality of service report that actually lists quality of service by account.\u00a0 And then in the last couple of days, we composed that with our Top Customer program to see if any of them were experiencing issues.\u00a0 Sure enough it seemed so \u2013 about 4 out the the top 30 or so seemed to be getting experiences of lower quality than we expect to be able to deliver.\u00a0 So we contacted them to ask if they were seeing issues themselves and today, we got the first response back.\u00a0 The response we got back included this:<\/p>\n

\u201cI had put this down to general connectivity\/service issues, but if you\u2019re saying that you\u2019re seeing this your side then yes something must be amiss. The reports I\u2019ve had from devs are slow pull requests \/ more than normal commit fails and general authentication issues. Nothing so severe that we\u2019re unable to operate, but is requiring an extra retry or request.\u201d<\/p>\n

As my 16 year old daughter would say BAM!\u00a0 We identified an issue a customer was having before they were frustrated enough to contact us to complain about it.\u00a0 I\u2019m incredibly<\/em> happy about that.\u00a0 I suspect we\u2019ll need to continue doing this kind of cross checking for a little while but, ultimately, we don\u2019t want to even bother the customer with it, of course \u2013 we just want to fix it for them proactively.<\/p>\n

I also ultimately want to evolve our service health dashboard on http:\/\/www.visualstudio.com\/support\/support-overview-vs<\/a> to provide a personalized view so you can see how your individual account is doing rather than the entirety of the service.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a journey and we\u2019re not nearly done yet but I\u2019m really excited about this milestone.<\/p>\n

Brian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I sometimes use an analogy to a bag of sand.\u00a0 I use it to refer to treating something in the aggregate.\u00a0 Each grain of sand can be inspected for mineral content, density, porosity, size, color, etc. but usually we just talk about how much of it there is.\u00a0 In software people sometimes use a similar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":244,"featured_media":14617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8],"class_list":["post-1191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-vsonline"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

I sometimes use an analogy to a bag of sand.\u00a0 I use it to refer to treating something in the aggregate.\u00a0 Each grain of sand can be inspected for mineral content, density, porosity, size, color, etc. but usually we just talk about how much of it there is.\u00a0 In software people sometimes use a similar […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/244"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}