What do you call a latte with no coffee? Steamed milk.
Yup, that's right, I paid $3.50 to the cute European girl behind the counter of my local superdeli for a cup of steamed milk. Of course, when I bought it, it was too hot to drink, so I waited until I got up to my office to take a sip.
"Hmm...", I thought to myself, "this coffee is really mild", not wanting to believe that someone could forget the defining ingredient in a recipe that only calls for two ingredients. But, indeed, she had.
This got me to thinking. What makes me willing to pay $3.50 for hot milk mixed with flavored water? I can buy a gallon of milk for $3.50 and brew dozens of pots of coffee for a similar price.
The answer is convenience, pure and simple. Buying coffee means that I don't have to clean the pot, make the coffee, heat the milk, froth the milk (with a whisk, no less), combine the two, and then clean it all up when I'm done. Instead, I just get on the train, make a quick detour on my way from the subway, chit-chat with the cute European girls, and get to my desk with a nice hot cup of coffee.
But all the convenience in the world isn't worth anything if you can't execute on the basics. I know I could probably go down right now and complain and I would get a replacement (assuming they have any sense of customer service). But it's too late. I probably won't go back to get my coffee there. I will tell other people about my bad experience. There are some times that you get only one strike before you lose someone's business.
What's worse, is they have no way to know that I am unhappy. I don't want to go to the effort to tell them they messed up, so they can't intervene in the situation to make me feel better about my experience by giving me a free replacement.
So why am I blathering on about getting stiffed on one little coffee? Because it occurred to me that the coffee business is very much like Copilot. Copilot makes it easy to do remote tech support. You don't have to have physical access to the machine, wait around while your aunt finds the password to her wireless router, set up port forwarding, change her network to static IPs so DHCP won't break the port forwarding, install VNC, go to Starbucks to test it (where you'll undoubtedly get that $3.50 cup of coffee), and then clean it all up when you're done. Anyone can do all that, but few people want to.
But if Copilot's value is convenience, then it is critical that we do it right the first time.
We work hard to do just that. We dog food extensively: we all use it to help our friends and family, and Fog Creek uses it daily to support FogBugz, so if there's ever a problem, we know about it first, before it impacts our customers. We have crash reporting and extensive logging, so if a problem does reach our customers, we know about it promptly and can proactively contact those users. And if all else fails, we make it as easy as possible for users to contact us by putting our email address and phone number right on the website so we can make things right.
Now we just need cute European girls...
Cross posted at http://hicks-wright.net/blog/extra-latte/
