User or customer?

For the IT department in most companies, work is mainly focused on improving or supporting the business' needs. Depending on the size of the company and the line of business it does, this is obviously handled differently. For a manufacturing enterprise, IT would be the backbone, ensuring that production is kept in speed with the orders that comes in and the products going out, as well as the financial department getting its numbers to ensure that the company is making profit. The company as such has its customers, who are the reason that the company can strive and grow. If the company is large enough, it will have an IT department that handle both internal and external IT related issues, within the IT department, the support would normally be located. IT support would, depending on the company of course, be focused on internal IT related issues. Here lies my question. Are the employees within the company to be considered customers or, as the technology term is for accounts within the company, users?

As my experience tells me, this is not something that has been decided in most companies, however, it should. For IT support staff to know how to deal with users in the system, they need proper guidance from management on where the boundaries on users requests finish. Some companies supports all users, in every situation, no matter the location, system or software/hardware. If the company is large enough, they might have a specific department, ensuring that the needs of the users are met, this might be connected to the IT support, and it might not. If not, there needs to be strictly stipulated and followed guidelines for the support staff to follow, or the users will soon enough figure out who is to contact to get the most help possible, often at the support staffs expense. Just because the company has 10.000+ employees doesn't mean that the staff will figure out who will help them out the most.

That one person, who is walking the extra mile to ensure that all users are happy, will probably have a history in service related business, have an ego to feed, or, might of course just be kind and helpful at heart. The somewhat harsh statement I make about the extra helpful staff is that, not only, will he or she get a huge workload that is hard to measure, his colleagues and the rest of the organization will look bad in comparison.

My point is, that IT support management should to all extent, ensure that all users are considered customers. Not because everyone should walk the extra mile I think that they should to the extent possible, but because everyone within IT support should treat the users with respect and correctness, no matter what. If all customers are treated equally, all customers will be equally likely to contact IT support, no matter who answers.

This lifts two following questions though, how do we ensure that all levels of  customer related IT support has the same idea of service? Also, what should the non customer related IT staff treat the users like? I will make a bold statement on the latter, let's consider the users as guests in our world, much like the view in the hospitality business.

In the beginning there were geeks.

Many people have, since workers got reliant on computers, seen IT support as a group of playful boys or men with limited people skills and a strange lingo. This might have been the situation years ago, but for quite some time now, there has been a paradigm shift, the IT support department is often still a group of playful people with wierd lingo, but then there aren't necessarily many similarities to the classic IT crowd. One of the issues that you experience as a supportee is that a lot of people have expectations that this is the case, thus either on beforehand decide that they don't understand anything and wont be bothered about learning a thing or two, or in an even worse scenario, be reluctant to contact us at all.

These are, in my opinion, two of the greatest obstacles you run into as a supporter and I'm not sure which is worse. If someone is afraid to contact us because of the misconception that they might be considered stupid, or that they have given up the thought of learning something new. No, you don't have to dwell in the possibilities that visual basic might enhance the way you use Excel, but maybe you might get an idea on why we ask what we ask. For instance, I am horrifically bad at many things involving economy, but still, I know the importance of it both in professional and in personal life, and therefore I never miss a chance to ask a "stupid" question. I had a teacher once who said, "There is inly one stupid question: Do i need to know this?" and this is something I use as a mantra when interacting with my customers.

My hope is that this blog will be about this very thing, interaction between IT and the business.