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Corporate Informational Technology (also known as IT) teams are challenged to protect the corporation while meeting its business needs with technology. Many of these teams lean more toward the protection side of that equation.

I thus hear IT customers often chanting “IT is not customer focused!” when I first go into an IT organization to improve customer experience focus.

I also witness CIOs and their IT teams doing wonderful things yet still falling short of customers’ expectations.

My key questions to CIOs are:

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Are your IT teams truly customer focused?

Whose checklist are you using? Yours or your customers?

Two reasons IT organizations miss the customer focus mark:

Many are measuring and comparing themselves to best practices in their own IT industry! Best practices have value yet they don’t tell you if you are meeting your customers’ expectations.

Many wait for complaints to rise before understanding the customers’ view of IT service quality. But this squeaky wheel approach, screams out “non-customer focused”.

Your IT Customers’ View & Checklist

1. Talk to us about our business goals not about your IT processes. Use your IT processes behind the scenes to reach our goals.




2. Be able to adapt to our sudden business changes. Success is not always planned.




3. Mobility has not just arrived. It is an integral part of our business success. Make it both easy and secure.




4. Solve our short term business need when it is urgent — then solve the root cause later.




5. Speak our native language when we call for help. It difficult times, we need people we can easily understand — else our stress level goes up and our productivity down.




6. Don’t behave as if you are indispensable because we work for the same company. Collaborate with us — we are in this together.




7. Change is difficult for most everyone. When you are introducing changes in technology to our work, minimize the damage to us and to the business.




8. Treat us like valued customers — not like burdensome users.




9. Show us how excited you are to meet our challenges — not how excited you are about technology.




10. Respect our expertise and empathize with our frustration. Then use your expertise to minimize our frustration and and combine it with ours to solve the problems!




11. Rigid procedures make you feel secure yet they scare the bejeebers out of us. Don’t strangle our success with your inflexibility.




12. Be our heroes when tough times hit.

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Find out how your customers rank you on these 12 points!

Customers rank you high in customer focus when they both like and trust you. For information technology (IT) teams, this means getting every IT team member to see and behave through the business lens.


Question: CIOs, IT Directors, and IT Managers — besides cost of delivery, what are your top 2 customer focus challenges? How would your team members answer this question?


From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

©2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please first email info@katenasser.com for terms of use. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Related posts:
Customer Experience Blooms When We Flex

Super Customer Focus: Customers & Us in Harmony

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, is a former IT professional. She delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on customer service focus, teamwork, and leading change especially to technical organizations. Kate turns interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

Is technology killing customer service in healthcare? Has technology removed our reason to care for others?

Technology has contributed countless life changing advances to healthcare yet I see two distrubing customer care trends.

Image by and Courtesy of:Daneel Ariantho


Our Reason to Care
As I see technicians and nurses working with me and friends/family, their behavior alarms me in two ways. Some let technology remove their sense of reason and logic and others have lost the human reason to care.


Story #1
A dear friend who is a large size person knows from experience that automatic blood pressure machines frequently report false results because of her large size arm. The nurse insisted on using that device and the machine reported very low blood pressure. My friend with a history of blood pressure issues, questioned the result. The nurse replied, “But that’s what the machine is reporting.”

My friend urged the nurse to use a traditional blood pressure device with a large cuff. This time the result was much higher than usual. The nurse, seemingly stumped, said: “Which result do you want me to note on your chart?”

Don’t Let Technology Remove Good Reason

1. Technology alone does not provide complete care. If you are getting two very different results, good judgment would guide you to question and perhaps test again.
2. Relying completely on technology assumes that technology cannot make a mistake. Yet good reason would suggest that variations or mistakes in input or use of the technology can cause faulty results.

Story #2
I was undergoing a medical test conducted by a technician. As the technician vigorously moved the wand around inside of my body, she never once asked how I was doing. I told her I was in pain and her response was “I can’t get good pictures of what’s going on” as she continued on with this painful test. I finally said “enough!”. She then said, “Oh, well if you would go empty your bladder again it might make it easier.”

Her demeanor spoke volumes about her focus. Her reason for being there was purely technological not human and diagnostic customer care.

Result: I never went back to that radiology center and told many how poorly the technician treated me. The next time I needed a test, I found another company which I now recommend to all my friends and family.

Technology is a wonderful adjunct to the human brain. Let’s not allow technology to remove our good judgment or reason to care!

Questions:

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Where in your life have you seen technology overtake people’s reason and judgment? Why do you think this happens? How can we prevent it?

In healthcare this poor judgment can be very scary. Where else do you think this error can cause great harm?

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Curiously yours,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers consulting, training, DVDs, and keynotes for customer service and teamwork — that turn interaction obstacles into professional success especially in tough times of change. See this site for workshops outlines and customer results.

I spend my professional life teaching, consulting, speaking, and coaching on people-skills (aka soft skills) in this technology filled world.  In fact my special niche for years has been delivering customer relations and teamwork training to technology organizations.  That’s no surprise since my first career was computer programming and systems analysis.   When I left to start my own company 20 years ago and shifted over to people-skills, I knew that technology would continue to come on strong in daily life — as it has.

We can debate how much is too much, yet there is no denying that technology has, does, and will continue to make contributions to daily life.  Recently, as some friends were reflecting on the good ‘ole days when people weren’t always texting, I remembered a time in the fifth grade where technology, if you’ll excuse me, saved my A.

The teacher had been teaching us about the heart, blood, and what it does for the body.  It came time for the test and one of the questions was: Which type of blood cells contains iron – (a) red cells, (b) white cells, (c) neither ?  I never heard her mention that!  I was just about to guess when I suddenly remembered a frequent TV ad about something that would “fix your iron poor tired blood”.  They had a picture of sickly looking red blood cells before the treatment and nice bright red ones after the treatment.  I thought, hmm, let’s go with (a) “red blood cells” final answer. I was right.

Lucky for me color TV had already been invented.  Can you imagine the pickle I would have been with only black & white TV? I mean, let’s face it, color TV definitely saved my A!

Has technology saved your A in some way?  Would love to hear your story …

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach in This Technical World

It is my pleasure to introduce my first guest blogger, Pattie Roberts. She is a freelance writer specializing in marketing. Yet in this article she reveals an insight on people-skills and technology that I just had to feature here.  Pattie and I welcome your comments below and directly to email.  Kate Nasser

When I was ten I realized that many people were not telepathic and it broke my heart.  In that one moment of epiphany I knew that I, like most of this planet, would live and die in profound isolation.  I would never really know anyone else’s thoughts or feelings, nor would they know mine.   This sober knowledge informed and drove everything I did from that moment on.  Which is why, amid all of the lamentation about how technology is killing personal interaction, I say bring it on. 

Two functionalities in particular – Twitter and texting – have been incredibly valuable in expressing grief.  Twitter and texting are so valuable to knowing others and being known in times of grief that it is almost too sad to recall old pain experienced without these tools.

We all know the studies claiming the number one fear, worldwide, is public speaking.   People would rather die than be embarrassed.   Showing weakness can be embarrassing.  Expressing a deep sense of desolation at the loss of someone dear can also be seen as weakness.  Can’t have that!   When I lost my mother, then my daughter, then my father, I “held up.” We all do it.  Be strong for others; cry alone.  For me, all that big grief was contained in a small circle of family and friends until this past January when everything changed.  Twitter and texting entered my world.

One of my dearest friends, Lezlie, a sister of the heart, lost her father on January 27.  His name was C. Berry Carter. We all called him Daddy Bear and he was my surrogate father for more than 20 years after my own parents died.  Daddy Bear started not feeling right at Thanksgiving of 2008 and by January he was gravely ill with liver cancer.  Lezlie was understandably frantic with worry and close to despair.  I had been through this many times but she, never.  I felt both her pain and my own. 

You wonder how you can feel that much pain and still live.  And it doesn’t keep convenient hours.  At 3:00 am I was still awake, too tired from weeping to sleep and so was she.  It all felt horribly familiar except this time, I had the next best thing to ESP with my friend.  I had Twitter and texting. 

U awake?  Yes.  Crying?  Yes.  Me too.

It was so strange and so comforting.  We could be together at any hour, from any location, without actually speaking.  Short bursts of instantaneous thought and feeling without the constraints of normal conversation were a godsend.  You can cry while you are texting without having to “hold up.” The soft ping of a tweet or a text doesn’t intrude like the screech of a phone ring.

I texted her funny quotes and photos of my dogs doing goofy dog things.   We were in closer contact than we ever could have been had we driven to each other’s houses or called and left messages.  We kept right on with the demands of our separate lives and saw each other whenever we could.  But with Twitter and texting, we never left each other’s side. 

After the service, I wanted to shout to the world that a great man had passed.  I wasn’t able to do this when my own dear ones left.  There were obituaries, of course, but traditional media are limited in scope and reach.  But now, cold, impersonal technology made the comfort of strangers possible.  I tweeted my sorrow and loss out to the Twitterverse.  I have no idea how many people may have read it but I felt connected to billions and it was a comfort unlike any I had known before. 

This past weekend I saw a post on LinkedIn by a man who had just buried his mother.  He wanted to salute her since it was so near Mother’s Day.  I felt for him — still not ESP, but the next best thing.

About the Author

Pattie Roberts is a freelance writer and researcher specializing in marketing-related writing.  Her analytic side loves to do the research to market your business.  Her expressive side comes out in the marketing plans, briefings, and presentations she writes for you.  She is currently writing grant applications for non-profits and is taking on new customers.   Pattie lives in Annapolis, MD, with her husband, the musician Hugh Feeley, and their two rescue Yorkies.   When she is not working on research for your business,  Pattie fusses over her roses, writes loooong letters to her stepdaughter in the Marines  stationed in Japan (ooh rah!), and thinks of faster ways to finish projects around the house and tweet those ideas.  You can Tweet her at http://twitter.com/pavroberts or email her at pavroberts@comcast.net.