What are the key components of great IT support?

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You can tell good IT from bad IT. We've all been around it. But it's about the experience you can provide, whether someone’s interacting with a human or a robot. That's how you know where your IT and engineering group is. And during remote working the issues we’re dealing with have grown exponentially because now we have problems like, "I spilled another coffee on this device.”

Our response is, "Great, go to an Apple store and we'll have it taken care of for you,” or “It's going to be drop-shipped, and all your data and everything has already been moved so you don't have to worry about that." That's how we create that magical experience, we put the customer first.

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We used to stock our inventory within our locations and whenever there was an issue we used to give them the laptop that way. Now we can provision it remotely and ship it to them, so they have that cool experience of opening up the wrapper and logging in, etc. These little things really impact customer experience, they light up about it. You may not think about these details but if you do, you'll have people saying, &#34;I had great support from IT.&#34;

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A critical aspect of customer service is that it's often the little things which really matter: how you talk to people, how you respond to them, how you make them feel important. I used to tell folks on my support team, "The worst thing you can do to people is leave them in the dark." It doesn't matter how hard you're working, it doesn't matter if you feel like a martyr because you wanted to go home at 7:00PM and stayed till 8:00PM to work on their problem—if they haven't heard from you, they think you've forgotten them. It's just that simple.

When HP and Agilent split, my job grew about tenfold. I went from having 40 people to 400 people overnight, with support teams across the country and in Asia, plus one in Europe. When I finally got a meeting with the business head for my division, he said, "You're already winning because you're responding to my emails." I was blown away, because he was serious. Sometimes it's the dumbest little things, and the fact that we don't pay attention to them is what kills the experience for the customer. It’s like going to a new Mexican place and the chips on the table—the first thing you get—are stale. What does that tell you? Nowadays if the chips are stale, I don't even order.

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Empathy. Humanity, walking in someone else's shoes. Soft skills. One of my first spot audits of IT support, I monitored the inbound calls and to my deep chagrin listened to a call where a first level.support manager gave someone who was traveling absolute lip service rather than solve their problem. Telling the caller they had to wait until their return to get a fix was just completely unacceptable to me.

I got the details, called a retailer near the guy's hotel and bought a lap top. I got one of their IT support people on the phone and spent the next 4 hours pushing our image, and reloading his data from backup over secure FTP. I got the hotel concierge to arrange a pickup and had it sent up to him, along with breakfast, compliments of the ITO.

While I didn't fire the IT manager, I moved him into a new role, IT support for Travelers, a 7x24 on call service. I let the BUs know that he was their single.point of contact and that his responsibility included making sure spare equipment would be available at every office location worldwide, and could be sent to their location whenever it was needed complete with all their data.

While he was truly miserable I gained enough data to be able to support changing hardware vendors, mandating backup and recovery policies specific to road warriors, and the value of having local support staff on call for travelers in specific regions.

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Politely and correctly getting the job done. Attempt to prevent breaking, but if it does, be fast and professional.

Warm and fuzzy is valuable, but most people are facing disruption in their ability to accomplish their goals. Getting back on track is more important.

What are the key components of great IT support?

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