Understanding the Client's Pain
Senior Application Developer and Full Stack Engineer at Thoughtworks with almost a decade of experience working primarily as a Backend & DevOps Engineer. I've worked on Ruby & C# projects and am currently working on a Python one. I am an AWS Certified Solutions Architect and an Oracle Certified Cloud Infrastructure Architect at an Associate level. I also have reasonable experience working on GCP, primarily with Google Kubernetes Engine.
I'm also an aspiring public speaker who likes to give talks on soft skills and tech.
I also write blogs on various psychological aspects of work primarily to improve teamwork & interpersonal skills.
During my training in my very first job, I had an amazing trainer who taught us to separate the clients' issues from their problems.
He told us of his experience as a support executive when he once got a call regarding a faulty printer. The customer was furious that the printer wasn't working well and seemed to be at the edge of an emotional breakdown which seemed a bit over the top for such a simple issue.
Over the course of the call, he was able to get more details as to why the customer was reacting that way. The customer was a student who was trying to print an assignment that would count towards a major part of the final grade. Not being able to submit meant that the customer would fail their class resulting in losing their scholarship and having to leave the country as there was no way they could afford the college on their own.
Not being able to print was the issue but the underlying problem was much bigger. Our trainer told us that while our clients may call us to address their issues, it is much more important to understand their problem.
Doing that may even help us circumvent the issue or at the very least come with alternate solutions.
If you and/or your organization are aiming for customer satisfaction/delight/obsession, understanding the problems behind your customers' issues should be your first step.
Even if you are not able to solve the problem, your clients will trust you more for taking the effort.
