In support, it’s common to track positive and negative feedback. At Automattic, we call those green (good) and red (bad) robots. Happiness Engineers review green robots to celebrate awesome conversations and red robots to identify areas they can improve.
There’s another robot that frequently gets ignored—blue robots.
Blue robots are the equivalent of “Meh, the support I received as alright.” It wasn’t great. I probably got my question answered, but I wasn’t blown away.
Blue robots don’t tell their friends about Automattic’s products. They aren’t tweeting how wonderful WordPress.com is. They aren’t “raving fans.”
There’s another group that we certainly ignore. These are the customers that don’t say anything. They get a feedback survey after a customer interaction and don’t feel motivated to reply. We didn’t cause a strong reaction either way.
You can’t move every customer to the poles, but it’s worth reviewing these interactions too and asking yourself:
“What could I have done to turn this customer into a raving fan? What would have set this interaction over the top?”
It’s logical to focus on the poles but don’t forget about the middle.
H/T to Dean at Automattic for originally pointing this out to me.