I talked about this earlier, creating a customer service department with great retention of both customers and employees is the dream of every service company. I don’t know anyone who enjoys the reputation of ‘perfect customer service’ or even ‘consistently good’. IT isn’t directly concerned with ‘customer service’ – it’s ancillary to the core service of providing technical services but still very important.
I've heard a lot of talk on the subject of building great service organizations, usually by management consultants, managers and business owners. I've rarely read anything written from the trenches, by people who did it for a living and not just as 'research' for more than 3 months. I thought I'd offer a few points from that perspective to help explain why customer service / tech support organizations have a high burn rate and why you occasionally hear a 'horror story' about a rep that lost it and took it all out on you.
What’s weird about IT is how the mating of ‘people’ and ‘tech’ is different depending on your job role. For instance, doing phone support is a difficult job – you must understand the technology to where you can describe it blindfolded to someone who may be seeing it for the first time. It requires people and communication skills. So does being a consulting systems engineer. As anyone will tell you, though, doing phone support is usually considered* the bottom rung of a support organization whereas being a consulting systems engineer is considered to be a career target. What is the difference between the two? The difference is in two things: The perception of value that the solution has to the client and how integral you are to everything working correctly. That's challenge #1.
Let's look deeper, IT is not only concerned with the public's perception of value - we've learned by experience that people will sometimes take a while to understand what we're advocating. We have our own perception of value, based on the geek factor of the solution we're implementing. That's challenge #2.
The wetware manifests itself again for challenge #3: People freely translate 'professional courtesy' to mean 'punching bag'. Every service organization, no matter what service they provide, experiences this: You can have 100 great customers who treat you politely and thank you for your help - Customer 101 will be rude, snarky, petty, condescending and unpleasant. Guess which one we will take with us? Actually, we might not if we were only treated rudely 1% of the time - the actual numbers are probably in the 15-30% range.
Challenge #4? Your management. Management has to not only provide consistently positive customer service, they have to do it without sacrificing their profit margins. They're in the business of providing goods and services at a profit - you can't do that by driving away customers or by driving away customer service reps, which also happens to drive away customers. They're in the proverbial space between rock and hard place and so, by extension, are their employees. Business has taught us the value of following a process to ensure quality, but human interactions consistently challenge that logic.
So, these are [some of] the challenges being faced by IT. My question to you is: what do we do about them?
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