Customer service in the IT field

shodown

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vCole

I have to say - great blog entry. I agree with everything said. Nicely put!

erpadmin

Spelling and grammar errors aside, I think this is a fine blog entry. Too often, many techs used to want to be like "Nick Burns: Your Company's Computer Guy" from Saturday Night Live. This tech definitely was the norm 10-15 years ago, but now he needs those soft skills or else he will get canned.

One thing I will never agree with though is referring to the user as an end user. Yes, to his face, I will refer to him as a client/customer/or even just regular user. "User" is not derogatory; moron and idiot probably is though. My boss tried to ban the word some time ago before we all threatened mutiny and hence backed off. But we explained to her that there is nothing derogatory about it.

Bottom line though, users/clients/customers are to be treated with respect. The same as you would want when you have to call a CSR.

shodown

erpadmin wrote: »

Spelling and grammar errors aside, I think this is a fine blog entry. Too often, many techs used to want to be like "Nick Burns: Your Company's Computer Guy" from Saturday Night Live. This tech definitely was the norm 10-15 years ago, but now he needs those soft skills or else he will get canned.

One thing I will never agree with though is referring to the user as an end user. Yes, to his face, I will refer to him as a client/customer/or even just regular user. "User" is not derogatory; moron and idiot probably is though. My boss tried to ban the word some time ago before we all threatened mutiny and hence backed off. But we explained to her that there is nothing derogatory about it.

Bottom line though, users/clients/customers are to be treated with respect. The same as you would want when you have to call a CSR.

Thanks for the reply

Yeah I will work the Grammer and punctuation later on. I just finished, once I have several blog entries and have enough to post every day or 2. I will have time proofread to get stuff out.

Bl8ckr0uter

Good article. I read the rest of your blog and I am following now. Keep updating it!

rfult001

IT has operated in a silo for a long time and back in the days we did not have to deal with people, just the technology. These days IT is an essential business function and as such has become customer facing, be it internal or external customers.

This is why IT Service Management has become essential. We are no longer managing or implementing technology but in the business of delivering services. Since we are trying to deliver our services to meet the needs of the customer we need to speak the customer’s language. This is the essence of customer service…speaking the customer’s language.

We were assimilated into the business world and we had to start dressing, acting, and talking like it…unfortunately, some of the IT crowd haven’t figured this out yet and they continue the “Nick Burns“ stereotype.

Pash

I work for an IT service company. It is what we do. We operate ISO standards and yet we supposedly have highly skilled and mixed discipline engineers.

Make no mistake guys and gals, as stated in that very good blog entry we are slowly becoming more of a service related industry. It's a hard thing to balance isn't it, people who can get things fixed and those who can talk to the end user about anything else but their actual issue. 1st/2nd/3rd line is really such a thin structure now. Only larger organisations can really claim to have these levels defined and working.

Personally I find, being polite, co-operative, logical and firm in that mix as the best combination. We all have SLA's/response times to look at but in the end users only ever give good feedback when you really go out of your way to make sure their IT is working.