How a Major Bank's Frustration with Call Transfer Times Led to an Engineering Breakthrough
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INTERVIEWER
Um, so this one now is, it's gonna play off the last one a little bit, which is, uh, you were getting. Indirect customer feedback that things were broken. Customers were failing and falling out of the, the, the flow, uh, and you had to, to kind of figure out why and fix it, uh, but in this question what I wanna focus on is a time where you specifically and, and in your engineering, uh, leadership role, I understand that sometimes you're not surviving direct contact with the customer and it's product management. I understand that, uh, but in Microsoft more so, uh, you had engagement with the customer, so you'll see a bit more of it. So I'm looking for a time where you had to take pointed. Directed difficult feedback from a customer about a feature, product, whatever, uh, for which you're responsible that you had to process and do something with, not, you know, ignore and go, oh yeah, that sucks and, you know, sorry to hear that and send him a nice email, but like you, you had to take it and make a decision and act on it versus just, wow, that sucks. We got bad email guys, right? That, that, that doesn't work.
CANDIDATE
No, no, I, I, I get that. I, um, so, so there are, uh, maybe just a little bit of, uh, philosophy for me. I am part of every step 1 and step 2 incident that happens on, in, in one side of the house because that's what I'm responsible for. So there's plenty of feedback we're getting from customers there, but I talked about one. Specific case with um um and then maybe a little bit of uh philosophy. I love to sit with the product management. The product management is the one that really takes heat from our customers, but, uh, I sit with the product management on calls, uh, where we have, we call, um, for lack of a better word, we call high value customers. In all conversations that my product management has with them, I, I ask them that I, I'd love to sit, even though they're taking the heat, we'd like to listen. So, we've been working with, um, I'd say probably close to 8 months with a It's one of the biggest banks in, in Australia and in the As, as a product owner for uh what is called lightweight call center on the voice space, I, I have a team that, that does lightweight call center. We've been getting constant feedback from them for the last 8 months that are transfer times, so call transfer times within the 6 to 8 2nd range. So let me give you a little bit of um rebound into why call call transfers occur. Most, um, you know, banks and what have you, they have an external facing 1-800 number that is a global number that they share across US or, or, or in, in countries, and then the, the number then, um, goes into various call queues as, as they're called internally, um, for departments like, you know, sales and what have you, right. This process, the, the call coming into the external number and then, you know, getting transferred to the right place was taking 6 to 8 seconds and then that was. And the customer that we were working with was like, we cannot work with a product in our banking system if your, if your transfer, if your transfers are taking 6 to 8 seconds. And then, and we said, we promised, OK, we're gonna fix this and then we're gonna fix this, um, by, by, by, you know, in, in, in the time frame. They're asking us to essentially fix it. And then it, it made the reason we were in this. The reason we were in the space was we had built the product initially uh in as a set of microservices, um, you know, not thinking too, too deep as to what the implications were, and because it was a process to process communication over the wire, it was taking longer. So I said, OK. We have to address it and that feedback that we're getting from the bank in Australia, while they were the loudest, it was not the only feedback. So we said we've got to address this. So we had a feature crew that was focused on this specific issue. How do we get call transfers from 6 to 8 seconds to subsecond because that's the only. Um, in a call, if it takes less than 1 2nd, most people don't notice that the transfer is happening. Um, so we said, how do we bring it from 6 to 8 seconds to less than 1 2nd? So we built a feature crew. We had to rethink the way we did our original microservices and then rebuild a different platform where. The two microservices that were running separately in two distinct, as two distinct processes had to be brought back into one process and call had the transfer had to happen in memory across processes that required. Some serious rearchitecting and then I'm happy to report that we got that done, put that out, and then they were one of the first customers to, uh, tap program, as in like the early adopters to test it out. So that was one piece of feedback where I feel very good where we took a feedback where they were the loudest, took it back, got it back into the, into our product group, focused on it, got it done, and today, that, that. Feature now. I, I, I shouldn't call it a feature. That should have been the table stakes when we did it.
INTERVIEWER
Sure, I understand what you're saying that that that functionality exists in the product, uh, broadly. How long end to end from when it surfaced on the call to release to test, but to that customer.
CANDIDATE
Um, I would say probably was a journey of 6 months. Um, yeah, so I'm thinking it went out, when did we last go out? We went out in August, but yeah, 6
INTERVIEWER
months. I'm trying to, I'm just trying to scope the, the level of work involved. And so how did you, because I, because it sounds like you're a thoughtful, uh, leader, engineering leader who wants to sit with product management and listen to the customer calls, and that's great, but But you know, as any good product manager will tell you, there's, there's the noise and then there's the signal. So how did you mentally prioritize this feedback against all of the other feedback you were seeing?
CANDIDATE
Yeah, yeah, great question. So when we do product planning, um, And then actually maybe I should step back a little bit. Even before we do product planning, we have a. A process in our team where we look at customer incidents every week. So we triage customer incidents. So my engineering leaders on the call center team and our, uh, program manager, um, on the call center team, we sit together and say, OK, what were the last week's customer incidents, uh, um, we, we look at, you know, we look at all incidents, but mostly focus on customer incidents over a period of time, what our program manager built, you know, a top list of, you know, what are the top 5 things that. This issue of call transfer is is consistently on the top for us and for us it was a no brainer, you know,
INTERVIEWER
from multiple, from multiple customers or just this one customer.
CANDIDATE
No, multiple customers, multiple customers. The bank in Australia happened to be the loudest, and then, you know, they were a huge enterprise and, uh, but, but it was very clear, uh, looking at our data week over week, call transfer times is, is, is always on the top, so it was a no-brainer that we had to pick it up and then, and do it. Um, and then that also determines how we stack rank most of our. Customer pain points, uh, there's nothing better than looking at, you know, at least for us, for me, I found out that, you know, looking at them every week gives us a good sense of, you know, an intuitive sense of what is the best way to, you know, categorize them. So that then, you know, quarter that come quarterly planning, we're not arguing, uh, is call transfer important or, you know, is, is bigger call queue agent size important or what have you. Uh, we, we have a good, good data set going back all the way to actually maybe a year and a half right now. That we consistently track through and and and it gives us, gives us a way to prioritize um our backlog during quarterly planning uh cycle. Uh, they're part of the loop, yeah, yeah, program management, they, they're part of the program management is part of the loop as well.
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