Kayak and Customer Intimacy

Kayak is a case study in how to get engineers to interact with customers to move your product or service ahead rapidly.

Paul English, their excellent CTO, put up a recent blog post on the subject that humorously features a red phone.

I continue to be amazed at how frequently organizations try to protect those "precious, critical path resources," their engineers.

The engineers are often complicit in this. They do all this project planning and get signed up for an ambitious string of deliverables. Then things happen -- new requirements come along, some things are harder and take longer, they are late and feeling the pressure. How do think they react when some well-intentioned, idealist jerk comes along and talks about what a great idea it is to have engineers handling customer requests and complaints directly? R-rated, to say the least.

It's the whole way organizations are set up that leads to everyone thinking that the "red phone" is a terrible idea. And that's a good test for your organization -- if the "red phone" seems like a terrible idea, then maybe your organization needs to change.

Comments

[handling customer complaints]

I read part of Paul English's blog on the "red phone." I think that's the kind of attitude that costumer support should have when answering their phones. It's a great concept, and he states it very humorously. Thanks for posting up your blog!