[APAC] Discussion of proposed working principle: "Make it easy, remove obstacles"
What's the idea?
GitLab Support's vision is to deliver a consistent, delightful experience to our customers. In our FY25 Direction, we also have a section dedicated to "delight our customers". But what can we actually do to delight? How do we delight?
We're looking to introduce a new APAC working principle to answer these questions: "Make it easy, remove obstacles".
Where did it come from?
This was largely inspired by reading about and discussing Customer Effort Scores and the origins of measuring CES.
One article described the following, that really resonated with those of us who discussed this topic during the Friday 16 February Collab session:
Make It Easy When it comes to service, companies create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly [aligns with our Solve Tickets Fast WP] and easily. Armed with this understanding, we can fundamentally change the emphasis of customer service interactions. Framing the service challenge in terms of making it easy for the customer can be highly illuminating, even liberating, ... Telling frontline reps to exceed customers’ expectations is apt to yield confusion, wasted time and effort, and costly giveaways. Telling them to “make it easy” gives them a solid foundation for action. -source
It went on to ask “what does make-it-easy mean” and answered that “Simply: Remove obstacles”.
Together, we pondered if this applied only to customers and agreed that it was just as applicable in our interactions with each other in support, and beyond with the wider GitLab team.
What would it look like in our work?
We explored what “Make it easy, remove obstacles” might look like in our daily work and considered the following examples:
- Every time we notice that a docs page is confusing, unclear or inaccurate and we take action to improve it - thereby removing an obstacle from customers, other support engineers, and the wider team when referencing that material.
- When we respond to tickets and take time to clearly state up front what we have understood from the customer’s description, and how we’re going to proceed, and by explaining why we need the things we’re asking from them. This makes it easy for the customer to correct our understanding if we’ve got it wrong; it makes it easier for them to understand why we are asking them to put in more effort towards solving the problem; it removes obstacles from gaining a shared understanding of what is happening and what comes next.
- Those times when we help customers with a problem they’re facing, and from experience we have a fair idea of what else they might encounter further down the track in the bigger picture they are working towards. We take the time to let them know “hey, the next part of the process involves this, you’ll need to do xyz to make that go smoothly”. We remove an obstacle by preventing them from needing to raise a subsequent support ticket and make it easy for them to keep progressing forward.
- When we share our productivity hacks with each other in the team.
- When we make sure we’re meeting the customer where they’re at and communicate in a way that is appropriate to their confidence and experience.
- Any time we put in to practice “Don’t let each other fail”, we’re typically removing obstacles or making it easy.
How to apply it
In your next interaction with someone, consider if there is an opportunity for you to “make it easy, remove obstacles”.
Last year (FY24) we had a catch-phrase/theme/motto of “Solve Tickets Faster”. We think that “Make it easy, remove obstacles” will be a useful and actionable phrase for Support Team APAC to lean into for this year (FY25).
What next?
Please share your thoughts, comments, questions, concerns here in the issue, at the team call, or in your 1-1 with your manager, or schedule a coffee chat with any manager. We'll chat about this at the team calls on 27th February and 5th March, and aim to mark the MR ready and merge it sometime after the 5th March team call if everyone is generally in agreement. You can also just leave a