On Customer Service

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My sister got married on Saturday in Pittsburgh, PA. A lovely time was had by all, and she’s happily on her honeymoon.

After the reception, however, she ran into a bit of a snag. When she and her shiny new husband came back to the hotel after the reception, they discovered that neither of them had a key card for the room they had both checked into two days before. So they went to the front desk and asked for the key card. The front desk refused.

Refused. My sister was in her elaborate bridal gown with her veil in hand, and shiny new husband was still in his tuxedo. It was approximately midnight at the end of a very, very long day. They refused to take shiny new husband’s ID, insisting on having my sister’s, since the room was originally in her name (in the room block that had both names, but whatever). Of course, her ID was LOCKED IN THE ROOM–the same room for which they were trying to get the key. After all, there aren’t many pockets in wedding gowns. Finally, after approximately 30 minutes, they got the key card.

In my opinion, this was a complete failure of customer service. I attribute it to two things: blind rule-following and lack of thought. I’ve seen user-facing geek positions have the same two problems.

I find that it usually happens when geeks are bored or burned out. They find it easier to simply auto-pilot according to a strict interpretation of the question asked or the rules of the company, and fall back on that instead of moving into problem-solving mode. Unfortunately for them, most companies don’t tolerate the lack of problem-solving mode for long.

Lack of thought certainly compounded my sister’s case. After all, is a couple clearly dressed in wedding finery and registered in a known wedding block in that hotel going to try to break into a room? At midnight? I don’t know many thieves, but that would have to rank amongst the most brilliant schemes I’ve ever heard of. User support geeks will sometimes fail to think as well. Specifically, they fail to think about what the user is actually TRYING to do, rather than what the user is actually asking.

Now that I look at it, good customer service really comes down to engaging your brain, and solving the problem. Geeks (and hotel employees) also need to have the power to implement the solution, but I think that’s a post for another day.

On Attitude

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Approximately two years ago, in my class on Authentic Leadership, we read an article (can’t find the citation–sorry!) on how having a positive attitude led to better working results in every single profession. Except in attorneys, which probably says a lot about my career choice to be a Leader of Geeks in the legal industry, but that’s not actually the topic of this post.

I find that geeks easily fall into sub-optimal attitudes, which usually fall into two categories. The first is what I call the “stupid user” category, where they develop the attitude that anyone who doesn’t work in their department or on computers is too stupid to function. The other I call the “end of the world” category, where they develop a Chicken Little attitude about anything that goes wrong.

A good example of the “stupid user” attitude is the Saturday Night Live sketch, Nick Burns, Your Company’s Computer Guy. From Wikipedia:

In the sketch, Fallon portrays “Nick Burns”, a caricature of the stereotypically condescending computer expert. Burns is the systems administrator for a large corporation, who is apparently always on-call to support technical problems. He is presented as a nerd, wearing multiple pagers and cellular phones.

…

He would start troubleshooting a problem by rattling off instructions to the character in confusing technical jargon, and quickly gets fed up by their relative technical ineptitude, eventually yelling his catchphrase, “MOVE!” He then sits at the keyboard and fixes the problem himself, gloating at the relative ease of the solution (“Was that so hard?”). There are two other recurring lines in the sketches: at the beginning of the segment, whenever it is mentioned that Nick Burns is coming into the office, Chris Kattan‘s character mutters, “I don’t like that guy”, and at the end of the segment, Burns exits, and comes back sarcastically yelling, “Oh by the way, YOU’RE WELCOME!”

My favorite example for the “sky is falling” attitude comes from real life. At one point, I had the pleasure of experiencing two server room waterfalls in one week’s time. After the first waterfall, I brought someone who is a software engineer in real life with me to help with the clean-up. He spent his entire time there saying things like, “You’re so screwed.” When I asked him (not as politely as I should have) why he kept doing that, he said that it was normal for his work environments. “We sit around and talk about what a mess things are, then we figure out how to fix them.” I didn’t take him with me to clean up after the second waterfall…

Neither of these attitudes is a good working attitude. The first attitude is antithetical to customer service; the users won’t like the geeks, because they feel like they’re being talked down to or belittled all the time. The second attitude leads to negativity and frustration–it is simply not a positive attitude to have.

In my work environments, I watch for these attitudes and actively discourage them for several reasons. First, I really want to create a service organization inside my law firm. Second, it’s just more fun to work around positive people. Finally, I want better work product from my geeks, and, since they’re not attorneys, a positive attitude leads to better working results.

On Communicating Expectations

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I love the suggestions I’ve gotten thus far–keep them coming! However, inspiration struck in the middle of the night, so you’re getting this one instead.

On Tuesday, I returned to work from the ILTA conference to discover that I had misplaced my staff. Or rather, that they had misplaced themselves. I stuck my head into the Help Desk office, only to discover that it had become a storage room. I turned around and located the office, only to discover that it only had one desk (and the corresponding one human) in it. I walked past the spare office, only to discover that the door was now labeled for the other Help Desk person. As you might imagine, I was relieved to discover that my name was still attached to my office, and my key still worked! (Although there was a huge cardboard box on my desk. Lame compared to my last firm, where they toilet papered my office post-conference, but we’ll work on that…)

I was somewhat shocked. After all, the promotions that would give the respective Help Desk folks their new offices haven’t come through yet. The two people working the Help Desk are now in different offices, and I was unsure that would be as effective as sitting six feet from each other.

However, this was exactly the final configuration that I had specified. And the only configuration I had discussed with everyone. Last week was slower than expected, so they executed what they knew to be the plan.

I had to sit down and figure out why I was shocked that they had executed the plan I had communicated. I realized that, while I had communicated the final plan to them, I had failed to communicate that I had expected it to be phased in differently. And that I had expected them to tell me a little more detail about the moves they were making.

They were executing 100% of what they knew to be the plan, and they were doing it faster than we had thought it could be done–there was nothing wrong with that. What was wrong was that I had failed to communicate how I expected them to execute the plan.

Lesson learned: geeks can’t read my mind. Also? My staff executes plans quite efficiently, when motivated. Next step: better define expectations.

Writer’s Block

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Anything you’d like me to blog about? Any questions you might have? I could use your assistance getting over my current bout of brain constipation.

Jenn Speaking at ILTA ’08

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For any of you who might be attending, I’ll be speaking at the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) 2008 Conference in Grapevine, Texas next week.

On Monday, August 25th at 10:30 AM, I’ll be a panelist in the “Best Practices in Professional Development in Law Firms” panel. Ruth Halpern, of Halpern & Associates, put together this panel; she’ll be providing the “meat” of the content, while Kathryn McCarthy and I will be telling all sorts of stories.

On Monday, August 25th at 4:00 PM, I’ll be a panelist in the “Business Continuity Technologies that Work for Law Firms of All Sizes and Shapes” panel. This panel should be fun–there are a lot of characters with a wide range of disaster experience. My role is pretty much the poster child for “what not to do.”

If you happen to be a New England ILTAn, I sincerely hope to see you at the Regional Meeting at 5:15 in Austin 1, 2, 3. After all, percentage attendance is one of the events for the Regional Competition!!

On Communication

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Let’s face it: geeks can sometimes be poor communicators.

(It’s tempting to end the post there to prove my point…)

I’ve seen geeks forget to inform colleagues and bosses that they’ll be on vacation, geeks neglect to inform companies about scheduled downtime, geeks fail to ask essential questions, and everything in between. So how does one, as a leader of geeks, deal with this?

  1. Know yourself. Many geek leaders were once geeks themselves. Have you inadvertently created a culture of non-communication? Do you tell your geeks if you’re leaving the office to play golf or have lunch? Do you let them know about potential changes and plans?
  2. Know your geeks. Wander into offices and cubes and ask what’s going on. Ask “why?”. And actually listen.
  3. Communicate about communication. Let your geeks know what is and isn’t acceptable to keep quiet about. For example, I make it clear that my geeks can tell me as much or as little as they want about their lives outside of work, but if I ask what they’re working on for their jobs, I require answers.
  4. Leave your door open. Allow your geeks to come by when they feel like doing so. Won’t happen much, but some geeks are more comfortable chatting than emailing. No, really, I’ve seen it. Honest.
  5. Revisit things. Introverted geeks won’t ask all their questions and voice their concerns in an initial face-to-face meeting; they’ll need to mull it over. If you don’t give them space to bring up these thoughts, you may never hear them. And they’re probably good thoughts to hear.
  6. Consider written communication. Email can be useful for this, but I’m planning to set up a wiki for my department to track projects.
  7. Don’t play the blame game. There are definitely unacceptable levels of communication (see examples above), but before ranting and raving at your geek about how he or she was REQUIRED to tell you about the system change, go into inquiry mode. Find out why the geek forgot to do it. Make it clear that it can never happen again, and then, if necessary, examine ways to prevent it. You may need to make a template email that the geek can send out to the company for downtime, or you may simply need to accept an apology.

If you try, you can probably create an environment where your geeks will communicate more. They’ll never become The Great Communicator (thank goodness), but you should definitely see some improvement.

On Inquiry

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Good geeks ask “why?”.

If you give them a number to hit, they’ll ask “why?”. If you tell them your sales goals, they might ask “why?”. If you ask them to do something, they’ll ask “why?”.

If your geek fails to ask “why?”, you probably don’t have a great geek on your hands. Or she is shy, and you should make her comfortable enough to ask “why?”.

Why?

Well, I’m glad you asked…

Asking “why?” shows curiosity, which is a close cousin of creativity. I find that geeks can get to the fundamental issues of a matter and develop a solution that is often better than the original task proposed (the one that they questioned). If they don’t ask “why?”, your geeks risk getting stuck in the box of your way of doing it.

Yes, it’s possible for them to go overboard, and sometimes you won’t have a good answer to their question, but don’t be worried when geeks ask “why?”, be worried when they don’t.

On New Brooms

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So the classic perception is that the new boss can–and will–make sweeping changes to an organization and staffing.

I can’t say this is very wrong.

I happen to be fortunate that my new staff is excellent, but there aren’t enough of them. And the systems? Well, let’s just say that we need to tweak them a bit, but I have a great foundation on which to work.

But I was having a conversation this morning with my senior network engineer, and we made the observation that I have about 6 months until I won’t be able to easily make big changes. So I need to move fairly quickly.

I plan to take the following steps:

  1. Assess
  2. Propose
  3. Execute

I’m almost done with step 1 now, and I hope to do step 2 next week. One thing I plan to do a bit differently, however, is that I will first get feedback from my staff on the proposal. After all, they already know the systems and players.

On Being a New IT Director

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I started a new job on Monday, and I sent this email to my new geeks:

Here’s the deal with this email: I want to set up individual meetings with you, but I also want to give each of you the opportunity to email me the answers to some of the questions first, so we don’t have to take up too much of your time at the meeting itself. It looks like my calendar is up to date with all two of my appointments, so please schedule a meeting with me for 30 minutes to 2 hours–whatever amount of time you’d like to have to chat, ask and answer questions, etc.

Here are questions (for the first eight or so, it might especially be useful for me to have your emailed response. Otherwise, I’m perfectly fine with just chatting about the rest.):

  1. What are your scheduled hours, and what hours do you actually usually work?
  2. Do you carry some sort of device with which you check your email evenings and weekends?
  3. When is your birthday (month/date)?
  4. What is your favorite cake from Rosie’s? (or let me know if you can’t/don’t eat sugar)
  5. What is your favorite caffeinated beverage?
  6. What is your favorite alcoholic type of beverage? (or let me know if you don’t drink)
  7. What’s the best bribe a boss has ever given you? Nothing illegal, please. Please note that the use of the word “bribe” is used in a joking manner in the first sentence of #7.
  8. Does it bother you to have someone (that would be me) swing by your office periodically during the day to make sure you’re still breathing and that your head hasn’t exploded?
  9. Did you understand my sense of humor in the previous two questions, or am I just overly tired?
  10. What does your typical day look like with regard to your tasks, duties, and stress level?
  11. What are your assigned responsibilities?
  12. What extra responsibilities have you undertaken?
  13. Is there anything that you really should be doing but simply cannot get to due to staffing, time, burnout, etc.?
  14. What are your current projects?
  15. What does your to-do list look like?
  16. What do you want your current job to look like (yes, in a perfect world)?
  17. What do you want to be when you grow up?
  18. What do you see as the next step in your career?
  19. What changes would you like to see in the IT Department in the next year?
  20. What do you definitely NOT want to have changed in the IT Department?
  21. What would you like the IT Department to look like in 5 years?
  22. What kind of boss would you like me to be?

Any questions? I’m happy to answer the first few if you’d like…

Jenn

On Honesty and Perception (and Humor. Oh, my!)

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Last night, on my way out of class, my prof told me to enjoy my new purchases (I’m starting a new job Monday and needed a bit of wardrobe refreshment). I replied, “Thanks. Now I just have to hide the receipt for the shoes from my husband.”

Her reply was, “Because of the principled leader that you are, of course.”

Now, my MBA program* has this tagline: Educating Women for Power and Principled Leadership. I’ve done my best, through electives, to really emphasize the leadership piece of mine–effectively concentrating in “principled leadership”. I also mention in a few of my posts (like that one On Honesty) that I hold myself and my staff to high standards of principled behavior.

And my husband already knew that I had spent a ridiculously huge amount on this pair of shoes–I called him right after I bought them.

I found myself thinking, “Does she really think that I wouldn’t tell my husband how much I spent on a pair of shoes?” (This coupled with the thought of, “Well, this time is at least better than when I bought that pair of $460 Dior sandals but thought they were $160 until I got the credit card slip thanks to messy handwriting on the label…”)

I think I can take a lesson from this: be careful with my jokes! I know that, at core, I’m a very honest person who would never hide the cost of shoes from her husband, but have I ever made that clear to my prof? Probably not–the class has 40 people in it, and I love cracking jokes and making controversial statements.

How people might perceive me is directly related to what I say. I think I might try to be more cognizant of that in the future.

*With which I’m almost done–one more class, nothing left to turn in! Woohoo! Ahem. That last paper ate last week, hence the blog hiatus…