STRIPES: Service Can Set You Apart

This entry is the final installment of the STRIPES series. For some background on the STRIPES series, check out the post form July 15, 2020.

I recently have had a lot of problems with delivery from UPS. The Post Office, FedEx, and Amazon Prime vans seem to get to my house with whatever parcel they have for me on time virtually every time, but UPS is consistently a day or more late, and on more than one occasion has just lost the package in their system. Just this past week they lost another one in spectacular fashion. I was watching the GPS tracking all day, excited to get my package - and then the truck sailed by my house without stopping. I ranted about my frustrations on Twitter because I’m technically a millennial - and that’s what we do.

If you haven’t seen Hamilton, you don’t get this reference. Watch it. Not because I told you to, but because you’ll be a better person for it.

The UPS Social Customer Service Rapid Response Task Force (I am certain that’s not their name, but I like to pretend there’s a room full of hyper-caffeinated elite forces waiting for a cranky tweet to pounce on it) replied that if I DM’d them they would try to help. Over an hour of back and forth DMs later, they told me that the parcel was on a truck that didn’t stop at my house… which I had known before they asked me to let them help. I was… wowed by their “fantastic” support.

As you can imagine, such a disadvantageous experience has had a somewhat deleterious effect on my perception of UPS’s value in society. I have since vowed to never use UPS if I can at all avoid it. As you are aware, this is an IT careers blog, so you may rightfully be asking what on earth this story has to do with tech careers. It’s simple, really. It’s rooted in my belief that everyone at every level of every organization is really in the service business, and that by doing service well it can be a huge accelerator to your career and your organization’s success.

I’ve had debates with several people about whether everyone in IT is in service several times, so I’m assuming that some reading this will debate the veracity of that assertion. I believe it pretty strongly - so to prove it, let’s look at a few IT roles and think through how being more service-oriented is an asset to all of them without exception.

Let’s start with the easiest one, client services, which I’ll define as any role where your job is to answer questions or fix issues for end-users directly. This includes roles such as working the call center, help desk, desktop support, or anything of the like. It should be obvious that putting an emphasis on service is a huge differentiator for anyone in these kinds of IT roles. While people want the folks they call for help to be technically competent enough to solve their issue, surveys that we and other institutions have conducted bear out that what they really want is to have a great experience from the person helping them. This certainly means that their problem is fixed, but it also means that the IT pro took the time to learn what their issue was, made them feel like they were important, and followed up to make sure the problem was resolved well. In roles like these, it’s easy to see how being great at more than just the technical aspects can propel your career forward.

What about being a storage administrator? Does service matter in such a back-office role? Do you even have customers to serve? Absolutely! Your customers are likely other IT professionals who are driving projects forward that require resources that you control. Being able to anticipate and smoothly deliver results to them matters a lot to those project managers or other administrators. And if they have a great experience working with you, it’s likely that they will request to work with you again – and trust me when I say that bosses notice if there’s a “favorite” in their group. Most managers are savvy enough to know that if someone is a go-to person it’s because they’re doing great work and making the boss look good. Trust me when I say that making the boss look good is always good for your career.

Speaking of bosses, let’s move up the corporate ladder a bit – in fact, let’s move way up the ladder to the CIO. Surely the CIO isn’t serving anyone, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. In fact, the CIO is serving the entire business by making sure that the IT organization is delivering on strategic priorities of the business. It’s the CIO’s job to make sure that the bulk of the time in IT is spent on things that serve the business by being a force of innovation to get new products and service to market. In a lot of ways, success in the CIO role is focused around how well you serve (there’s that word again) the company as a whole.

We could say the same thing about people in the application development space, project management, information security, or any other role. You can even say it of accounting. Ultimately everyone at work is there to serve someone else, be it customers or those serving the customers. It’s ultimately the entire purpose of every organization I can think of. That’s why I think service is so important – because it’s the core purpose of virtually every organization you could work for, so being great at it is going to be something that can differentiate you in your role.

I said virtually every organization.

So, how do you get better at being service-oriented? Great question. Let me give you just a few quick tips that I think can help move you along the path to being someone known for serving well.

First, don’t make everything about you. If you are asked for something that may be time consuming or difficult for you, don’t start your response by telling people how bad it’s going to be, and how it’s going to put you out. Instead, do it cheerfully. Tell them it will take you a bit, but you’ll get to it as quickly as possible. Then actually get to it as quickly as possible and complete it before you promised you would. Getting things back to people early is a tangible way you can show that you care about their timeline and want to give them what they need to hit it. Getting work product to people late expresses the exact opposite – that you don’t care about their goals very much. The point is to make sure you’re going out of your way to make your customers’ or clients’ lives easier – even if it means making yours a little harder.

Second, be great at communications. Nothing will kill your fledging reputation for great service as quickly as dropping the ball with communications. That means that you should be writing clear, concise emails that are polite and professional and provide both information and - if necessary - options and recommendations that your customer can choose. This even applies when you’re asked for insane things, by the way. For instance, if a customer requests 40 yottabytes of storage, because they don’t have any idea what they’re talking about or asking for, you can reply that you don’t have that much storage but you can review their technical requirements and see what you can do to help their project.

Another way to really beef up your communication is to provide regular (unprompted) status reports to your customers and if a project timeline is slipping let people know as soon as possible. Think of it like a car dealership. If you brought your car in for an oil change and they tell you it’s going to take an hour and you get your car back 2 hours later, you’ll be fuming. But if they come out in 50 minutes and let you know that it’s going to take longer than expected because an orangutan is loose in the garage, you’re going to be a lot more understanding because they communicated with you. You may also want to watch a bunch of mechanics catch an orangutan – I know I would.

One final way you can level up your service-orientation is by anticipating what your customers might need and delivering it without being asked to do so. If you manage your company’s AWS environment and you know that every time a new product is being QA’d they need a bunch of new services to test it, then get the service you know they’ll need ready before you’re asked to do so. Nothing delights a customer more than having what they want provided before they ask. It’s the same boost you get when you walk into your favorite coffee shop and they have what you want made before you get to the counter.

Ultimately, building your customer service skills is something that will invariably propel your career forward. Often skills like this are called “soft skills,” but more and more I think we’re recognizing in IT that these skills are often essential if you want to really make a difference for your organization and yourself. I know many of these “soft skills” aren’t something that I just woke up one day doing well. In fact, I’d argue that for many of them I’m still growing and practicing as some of them aren’t second-nature to me. I can say without reservation they’ve made a difference when I get them right though, and customer service skills might even top the list of things that I can point to that have made a difference in my career and those of many other IT leaders.

I’m sure they can do the same for you.

I hope you have enjoyed this STRIPES series. It has been fun for me to take the past seven weeks and think through how something my kids’ elementary school practices really doesn’t stop when you get out of fifth grade. Maybe we can still learn something from grade school, after all.

Some questions for reflection:

• Can you think of a time that you received poor service from someone at your company that is supposed to be a resource for you? What about it went badly?

• Can you think of a time when you could have personally provided better service to someone in your company? What could you have done differently?

• What can you do today to serve someone in your office that they might not be expecting you to do?