What is a good customer experience?

We recently found ourselves rethinking whether some of our core metrics were the right ones, and whether their targets made sense. It became clear that while we share an understanding of what a good customer experience is, we had never written it down. There was no manifesto to go back to when we define how to set up, improve, and measure the customer experience.

So we discussed it across Happiness, our customer support division, on our internal blogging tool P2: what is a good customer experience?

We’re deliberately talking about the customer experience, not the support experience. This puts the customer at the center of our thinking, and widens our responsibility beyond just the support we provide. We mean product, documentation, AI, and human interactions. Instead of specifics, which will always be in flux, we focus on principles, which should not change. When we weigh a metric, a tool, a staffing choice, or a change to how customers reach us, we ask one question: does this move a customer closer to the experience below?

Here’s how we define a good customer experience at Automattic, across all our products:

The best customer experience is one where customers reach their goal with our products, not just get unstuck. Customers will always have questions as some of our products solve complex problems, and good guidance is some of the value we offer. But every help request is also a signal: something the product could have made clearer, prevented, or done itself. That signal is work for our product, not noise for Happiness to absorb. As a result, questions from customers lead to better products.

When customers do need us, it’s effortless. Customers find help where they are, and we meet them on their own terms starting from their situation, not ours. Whichever product and whichever channel (AI, documentation, human), the standard of care is the same, and the path to a resolution is as short and direct as possible. And when someone is stuck, effort becomes less about the channel but about how we show up: calm, direct, and clearly taking the weight off them.

Customers leave with their problem resolved, and more capable than they arrived. When an interaction finishes, the problem is gone, for this customer or the next one who would have hit it. We read past the question they asked to the wider situation it came from, and have the tools and ownership to act. And the customers take something extra with them: a better way of doing things, a future problem prevented, more confidence in our software than when their problem was raised. 

Customers trust that we have their back. When a problem is ours, we own it with honesty and courage. When it isn’t, we don’t hand the customer back their problem and call it out of scope; we stay with them until they have a path forward. Here, trust is really owned. People stick with a company they trust.