Customer reviews can make or break your business. Today we received two great reviews on the Shopify appstore and we’re thrilled about it!

Wow, what a great experience! Now that we’ve been using it for a few weeks, not only are we seeing the abilities it has but our vendors are also loving the simplicity of the program / dashboard. Naruby and her team have been an amazing support to our team and we’re psyched to use Ordoro as our company continues to grow and evolve.

– Erie Drive

Customer Support has been readily available and prompt in answering questions and resolving issues. Can’t say enough good things about this App!

– Davia

We strive to provide stellar customer service, so it’s very rewarding to get the occasional pat on the back from our customers.

How we got a terrible review!

Things aren’t always rosy, however. Working at a startup is like constantly riding on an emotional roller coaster. Some days are brilliant (like today). Other days, it seems like everything’s going wrong. The only thing to do is to constantly listen to your customers, self-evaluate, and re-adjust based on what you see in your environment. The following true story illustrates that point:

Over half a year ago we started getting requests from Shopify sellers to build an Ordoro Shopify app. Our software had been well received on other e-commerce platforms, and after evaluating the Shopify app requests thoroughly, we decided to go ahead and build it. We officially released it in the Shopify app store shortly thereafter.

Things were going rather routinely until one day when a customer who ran into a corner case bug notified us of an issue. They called our support line and the complaint went into our support queue. The typical process is to follow up with the customer within a few minutes of being notified and help them resolve the issue.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened this time around. Instead of calling the customer back, the customer support specialist responsible for the support queue that day accidentally marked this issue as “resolved”. So there it went for 3 days, unnoticed by anyone which is terrible for a company that prides itself on providing outstanding customer service.

The consequences were painful for us. The customer wrote a terrible (yet justified) review of us on the app store:

After 3 days with the same error message with 2 calls to support that nobody answers and 2 days and still no reply to my email for help I have to un-install it. But what I did see I did not think it was worth the high cost especially with no support.

– Suzie Skin Care

We consider this one of the lowest points in company history. Till then, we were very proud of the level of support we offered. You could call our phone line and we’d be there to help you out. And our customers love talking to our support team. But despite all that, there stood this scathing review.

Learning from our mistakes

All we could do is learn from this mistake and take corrective action. We reached out to the customer two days after we noticed the review on the Shopify App Store and tried to explain the situation to them and see what we could do to make things right. Understandably, they were not very interested in what we had to say!

It was clearly our fault and we missed our window to take corrective action with the customer. At this point, all that was left to was try and see where the wheels fell off the wagon. We needed to understand the root cause of the problem.

Eric Ries talks about asking five whys to any problem. By doing the root cause analysis, we realized that our support queue management process was broken. It was very easy for someone to mark an issue as “resolved” mistakenly. We needed to fix that and we got to it right away. A new step was added to the customer support process where the person who is dealing with the support request must enter a note when they are closing an issue.  A simple change, sure, but one that helps ensure that we won’t close issues by mistake.

Things have been holding up pretty well ever since. We continue to listen to our customers and we continue to hear great things about our product and our service. And more importantly, we hear where we can improve and try and do just that for both our software and our customer service process.