Problem Solving

"Tell me about a time you had to make a judgment call with a customer when there wasn't a clear policy."

Had a client who'd been overcharged for three months—system glitch during a plan migration. Our policy said we could only refund one billing cycle. But the mistake was on us.

Client was upset. Talking about cancelling. I pulled the billing records, confirmed the error, ran the numbers. This client had been with us for years; their lifetime value was way higher than the refund amount.

I talked to my manager and finance. Proposed we refund the full amount as account credit (not cash) and throw in a small upgrade for the trouble. They approved it.

Client stayed. Renewed for another year. And we updated the refund policy to cover system-error scenarios going forward.

What I took from it: when policy's unclear, figure out what's actually fair. Consider the long game. Document what you did so the next person doesn't have to figure it out from scratch.

"How do you decide what information to include when responding to a customer?"

I ask myself three questions:

1. Did I actually answer what they asked? Sounds obvious, but it's easy to write a lot without answering the question.
2. What are they going to ask next? If I can pre-empt that, I save us both a round trip.
3. Is there anything here that's going to confuse them? Internal terms, technical details they don't need.

I also adjust based on who I'm talking to. A developer wants the technical details. A marketing manager wants the outcome. An exec wants a summary.

What I leave out: blame, jargon, unnecessary backstory, anything I'm not sure about, timelines I can't commit to.

"Have you dealt with a customer reporting an issue you couldn't reproduce?"

Yeah. Client said their conversion pixel was firing sometimes but not others. I tested their site a dozen times. Worked fine on my end. Every time.

First thing I did: believe them. If they're seeing it, it's happening—doesn't matter that I can't reproduce it.

I asked for specifics: browser, device, time of day, whether they were using a VPN or ad blocker. Then I tested on BrowserStack with their exact setup. Still couldn't reproduce it.

Dug into the server logs. Noticed the failures correlated with a specific geographic region. Turned out a CDN edge node was caching stale scripts. Once we flushed that cache, problem went away.

Environment matters more than you'd expect. Intermittent issues? Usually caching, race conditions, or network weirdness. And I kept the client updated throughout; they appreciated not being left in the dark.