Keep Wearing the Shoes

I work at CodePen. People on small teams like ours wear many hats, but in support I wear a lot of shoes, too.

Putting myself “in the customer’s shoes” is a fundamental support technique. It’s just plain easier to help when I try and see things from the customer’s perspective. From the same footing, we can get to the bottom of the problem so much faster.

I’ve learned not to hurry to take those shoes off after the ticket is closed.

When I get a support request, my ultimate goal isn’t to just close that ticket — I also want to see if we can prevent our members from having to open similar tickets in the future.

If the problem is something concrete, like a bug, the remedy is straightforward: fix the bug and the problem is solved.

But often, the problem is not so clearly defined. Keeping myself in the customer’s shoes gives me an opportunity to solve problems whose resolutions aren’t quite so linear.

When I keep myself in those shoes and try walking the path that lead up to the support request, I can find something we can improve, or discover a new way to explain things.

Perhaps I can open a usability issue, or add some more details to an error message.

Maybe I can make a tweak to the docs — add a new screenshot, show another example of how to use the feature, or replace a colloquialism that gets mangled in automatic translation.

And, in those times when I don’t come up with a new item for the todo list, I still learn something about how to help someone who comes to us in the same kind of shoes. Every time I try them on, they fit better.