Customer reliability engineering

I was blown away when I spoke with Dave Rensin during my visit to the Google campus. He is Google's Director of Customer Reliability Engineering, and his views on customer support are world-class.

Dave's goal is to drive customer anxiety to zero; to remove the things that would cause customers to want to leave.

To do this, Dave's team has several principles they follow:

1. Make sure your customer understands they are not alone. They need to feel a sense that "we are in this together" and you will stay with them until the problem is solved.
   
2. Ensure customers never feel like they are talking in a vacuum. Never let the customer feel like you know more than you are telling them. Tell your customer all the details (without sensitive info, of course).
   
3. Create a shared fate with your customers. Arbitraging issues with money (or credit) is not good enough. Dave's team reviews their customers' production systems and provide guidance on how to make it up to Google's standards. If the customer meets those standards, they will then identify when issues are caused by their customer's system, and proactively reach out with possible solutions (utilizing a shared dashboard both his team and the customer can see) -- and they do that for $0. This drives mutual accountability; truly being "in it together."

Dave goes into some details of the above in the video below. More details can be found in Dave's Google Blog post.