Should We Be Thought of Like Doctors?

Recently we've been getting blowback from customers complaining we ask too many questions or we didn't fix something right the first time. In thinking about it, I've begun to feel that end users don't look at us in the right light. Years ago I hurt my shoulder and went to the doctor (primary care doctor). When I went into the office, the nurse asked me why I was there (sorta like a NOC person asking what the issue was). She took some notes, added them to my file, and said the doctor would be in. Sometime later he comes in (helpdesk guy), reads her notes, and asked so why are you here? I explain again the issue, giving mostly the same information I gave the nurse, and he examines me. He ultimately believes the issue is a torn rotator cuff and sends me to a specialist (senior engineer/technology specialist). He asks all the same questions the nurse and doctor ask, but sends me for an x-ray. X-ray shows nothing and he says probably just some shoulder instability just workout and deal with it. So I do that for a year, but still have issues so I go back to the specialist. MRI is done, still shows nothing, but I still complain about issues. Finally, he sends me to a surgeon who says "we won't find anything, but I'll scope you to see." What was suppose to take an hour to just look, turned into 8 hours of intensive surgery for an issue that according to all signs didn't exist, per say (primary care doctor was right, it was a torn rotator cuff along with a torn muscle and most of my cartilage had worn away).

I attempted to explain this to management in a way they could understand (above). It seems people believe that there is some magical location that tells you why something didn't work. If it exists, I haven't found it. No one seems to think twice when a doctor sends you to various specialist and for various rounds of tests, but if you say you want a senior engineer to review the issue suddenly your a subpar tech who doesn't know what he's doing. Have others seen this? How have you shone the light to the heathen end users? Is the doctor metaphor incorrect?

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Comments

MrRyte

I can see where you're coming from; but look at it like this:
When was the last time you threatened with a lawsuit for a wrong diagnosis of an IT issue?

the_Grinch

True enough, I was looking at it a little more broadly (though technically if you screw up is stand up fashion as an MSP you could be sued). I guess the misconceptions and lack of understanding of technology in general from the end user perspective is ticking me off. Nothing gets my goat more then when management goes "we understand, but the customer doesn't so...". If the customer doesn't get it and it has been explained in every fashion imaginable, at what point does it stop being your fault that they don't understand? People seem to get so use to it just working that when it doesn't they lose total patience and common sense. I dunno, just rambling at this point haha

SteveLord

We'll never write as crappy as doctors do......if we ever write anything at all. 100% digital ftw

the_Grinch

LOL, sadly my handwriting is as bad if not worse (I'm pretty sure you would need a degree in Ancient Sandscript to be able to read my handwriting). Thank god for Word and Email!

Forsaken_GA

It really depends on how you educate your users. I've dealt with the same sort of blowback, and when I get that, I start explaining all the different issues it could be. Once the technical jargon hits, they usually get the point that it's not as simple as they think it is. So after I explain to them that I really need their help to narrow it down, and we'd prefer to fix it right the first time instead of having them waste time coming back again and again. When it's phrased like that, they usually come around, though some users require a few iterations of the process to get it. All the people I deal with regularly have now been trained to provide me with the information I need up front, after they realized that doing that got their problems fixed much quicker, the buy in was pretty much total. I still have to break in a new guy occasionally, but the other users have begun helping train the new people, and makes my job easier.

Just be patient, calm, and firm in your education. It takes time, but it's worth it.

Webmaster

the_Grinch wrote: »

Is the doctor metaphor incorrect?

Not entirely incorrect in this context imo. The are obvious similarities between a doctor and an IT pro when it comes to diagnostics, translating symptoms to a problem to a solution. But, that goes, to an extend of course, for a car mechanic too. I think every IT pro understands your comparison with doctors, but for non-techies/management it may seem a bit exaggerated ("Did he just compare himself to a doctor?"). How did management respond?

the_Grinch

My CTO said (in response to we ask too many questions) to rephrase and say "according to the ticket, you have such and such problem with the following being done". Other then that it was a suck it up and deal with it response opposed to any other suggestions on how to correct the situation. I understand the "customer is always right" mentality, but if their right to the point that it hurts them and business I take issue with it...

veritas_libertas

The only time I receive this kind of response from users is when I ask all my questions on the phone rather than in person. I'm surprised you are getting this kind of response from them but, every work place is different.

it_consultant

A couple of my clients call me "doctor" (jokingly of course) when I look at their computers. These particularly people are more savvy users and realize their particular problem is probably a misconfiguration somewhere that I need to ferret out. Like doctors, sometimes we have to try a couple of different "medicines" to narrow down and fix the problem. Sometimes, like doctors, we need to refer to our manuals (technet, google, etc) for assistance in our diagnostic tasks. I wouldn't put myself on the same plane as a MD, but the deductive reasoning, experimentation, case histories, etc are a similar process that we go through. I think it has a lot to do with IT and medicine being science based skills.

Devilsbane

A similar analogy could be used for an auto mechanic. Ever bring your car in because its making some sort of noise or other issue and they have to replace a dozen things before they find the problem? It really isn't too much different. We have knowledge and tools to help us diagnose a problem, but when there are so many possibilities, sometimes it just comes down to a guess and check scenario.

MrRyte

Sad to say; the customer or client has the upper hand. "The customer is always right" unfortunately gives the customer/client a false sense of authority. And it's not just IT; just about every field has those type of people that just doesn't get it (had to deal with those types quite a few times when I worked as a part-time valet supervisor....

). All you can do is just accept it and focus on resolving the issue asap.

That said; if a customer/client starts to belittle me or cause a scene that's when I'll speak up and defend myself in a professional manner. One person I dealt with got me so upset that I emailed her supervisor, HR and a few others about the interaction and she's been extremely courteous when asking for help ever since. Don't like to get people in trouble but there's only so much crap a person can take from coworkers or clients.

terryfera

The analogy really works for any job role that requires troubleshooting/repairs.

Think of it as a general troubleshooting process no matter what you're troubleshooting (computers, people, cars, electronics, plumbing, electrical, etc.)
- Gather symptoms
- Analyze
- Research (whether it be through your experience or any other means)
- Test solution
- Did the solution work? Yes? Yay! No? Start again or hand it off to someone who knows it better.

RobertKaucher

the_Grinch wrote: »

My CTO said (in response to we ask too many questions) to rephrase and say "according to the ticket, you have such and such problem with the following being done". Other then that it was a suck it up and deal with it response opposed to any other suggestions on how to correct the situation. I understand the "customer is always right" mentality, but if their right to the point that it hurts them and business I take issue with it...

The problem with this sort of leading question is that what you want from the client is their answer and to see how what they say has either changed or to see if they provide new information. You don't want to just assume that what the person who came before you got things right, and you also don't want to assume that the other person's impression of the situation, which will always color what they write, was 100% correct. It's like the situation with Hyroglyfics. Some ancient historian said "these stand for ideas not sounds" and even after the discovery of the Rosetta stone people believed this and it made decyphering them impossible until Champollion said - "What if these things Do stand for sounds?" Someone might have cracked hyroglifics 100 years earlier without the Rosetta stone if people had not been mentally entrapped by the notion that they did not represent sounds.

If you do not get the user's story from the user you are doing the person a disservice. You need to educate the users so that they know they are being asked questions twice or more times "Because the first guy needs to know where to send the ticket but I need to here what you have to say about your problem. Not what the first guy thought was important enough to write down. Spending a little time retelling what is wrong helps me get a look into what you experienced and not what the guy before me thinks you experienced and that will save you time in the long run." And that is the same reason why medical and other pros doing diagnostics ask questions repeatedly and in different ways.

ccnxjr

In addition to all else that's been said keep in mind any artificial system is an imitation of a biological one.
Cars need a source of energy and mechanisms to process that energy, a user interface (steering wheel, gear shift), some sort of feedback (dashboard, which really is an automotive term), etc.
So do humans, we have a digestive system, respiratory/vascular system, neurological system, etc.

I did work for a medical center once as a help desk tech and in response to an issue one of the doctors had I suggested that a problem might be cause by some manner of network congestion (his argument was that one PC was performing significantly slower than the other in accessing shared folder) , his response was "something like a cold? " I couldn't help but chuckle.
I ticketed the issue to one of the network engineers, turned out there were a lot of crc errors being reported on the switchport, and was resolved by just changing the switchport for his connection, which neither him nor I had access to.

One other time a Resident called up with a problem (honestly can't remember what it was, think it was network connectivity) but I told him that I had to dispatch a tech to take a better look at the issue, after the last 30 minutes of over the phone troubleshooting he was wondering what could an onsite tech provide and I mentioned a slew of other potential issue and said that it is possible that sometimes you may have a wide variety of causes for the same group of symptoms, he laughed and said " I know exactly what you mean!" .

it_consultant

There is a difference between being thought of as a doctor (essentially being a diagnostician) and working with actual Doctors, which can be equal parts horrifying and suicide inducing. We have doctors who round for hours on end and they complain they run out of battery life. My response, I can't change the laws of physics for ya. You will have to charge your laptop at some point, period.

Tesla did experiments with wireless transmission of electricity like 100 years ago but it never caught on.