Setting Expectations and Value
Far too often I hear our engineers saying, “No problem, this is a piece of cake. I can have it fixed in two minutes!” I cringe when I think about the likely fallout from those two sentences. More often than not the problem is more complex than we initially suspected and it will take far longer than two minutes to resolve. As a result of the initial assertion the client is going to be annoyed suggesting, “You guys suck! It took you two hours to resolve a very simple issue!” Instead you should consider a) increasing value and b) decreasing expectations, let me explain:
Increase Value: There is never an upside to downplaying your value (i.e. suggesting that ‘this is a piece of cake’). Get it? Your ego may swell a little when you suggest no issue is too complex for you to resolve, but the client will value your work less. What if instead you said nothing? Simply indicating you understood their request and that you would get back to them as soon as possible. If you were a bit daring you could even say, “Oh boy, this is going to be a challenge!” Either way, NEVER downplay your skills by suggesting that anything is ‘very easy’ or ‘no problem’. Obviously it is a problem or the client wouldn’t be asking you to fix. Lets face it, you are the expert ~ your expertise is valuable.
Reduce Expectations: Okay, lets get this straight, you have NEVER done anything worth doing in two minutes. You can barely have a conversation about what is broken in two minutes. You can’t create the ticket to document your work in two minutes. Literally, it is unreasonable to assume you could fix something in two minutes. So if you think it is going to take you an hour to do a task, estimate that it will take you two and then communicate to the client that it will take three hours. Empirically this will be an accurate estimate. When I suggest the 3x estimate rule many of you tell me that it is ‘dishonest’, but I assure you, after eight years of doing this 3x is far more accurate than 1x or 2x your original estimate. Lets face it, there are many factors outside of your control. Indeed, you may only spend 60 minutes fixing the item, but in the middle of that 60 minutes of work you answered three phone calls at 10 minutes each, talked to your boss for 20 minutes, went to the bathroom for 15 minutes and grabbed two cokes at 5 minutes each. Your 60 minute activity wasn’t delivered to the client 2 hours and 15 minutes. If you set the client’s expectation that you would have it done in 3 hours you would have delivered your work 45 minutes early.
If you can practice these two ideas I bet escalations related to your tickets/clients will be reduced by more than 25% if not more. Let me know how it goes.
