KateNasser.com

Informational Technology (aka IT) teams are challenged to protect the corporation and meet its business needs with technology. Many of these IT teams lean more toward the protection side of that equation. So when I go into an organization to improve IT service, I often hear IT customers chaning “IT is not customer focused.” Meanwhile I also witness CIOs and their IT teams doing wonderful things yet still falling short of their customers’ expectations.

CIOs: Are Your Teams Truly Customer Focused? A Checklist.

Two reasons IT organizations fall short on customer focus:

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

Many IT organizations wait for complaints to rise before understanding the customers’ view of IT service quality. This squeaky wheel approach screams out “non-customer focused” to the customers. In other words, by then they already think IT is not 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. Agility is essential.




3. Mobility is an integral part of our business success. Make it easy and secure.




4. Solve our short term business technical problem when it is urgent — then solve the root cause later. In other words give us a temporary workaround. It’s not the same thing a dangerous band-aid.




5. Don’t behave as if you are indispensable. Collaborate with us — we are in this together.




6. 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.




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




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




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




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




11. Be our heroes when tough times hit.

Find out how your customers rank you on these 11 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 use great people skills and interact through the business lens.

CIOs, IT Directors, and IT Managers, 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™

©2012-2018 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:
Super Customer Focus: Customers & Us in Harmony

Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading morale, employee engagement, leading change, teamwork, and delivering the ultimate customer service. Kate is a former IT professional with special skills to combine business and technology success. She turns interaction obstacles into interpersonal success in every facet of business. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

Tags: CIOs, customer, customer experience, experience, focus, hard skills, information, IT, people skills, procedures, Soft Skills, technical professionals, technical support, technical support reps., technology, Ultimate Customer Service