Your Services are the Gift That Keeps on Giving! | CX Recs
It is the holiday season, and first of all, I would like to thank those of you who continue to come back and read my articles every month! Secondly, I would like to discuss how your work to continue supporting your customer is a true gift to your users and your organization. You may not hear it all the time, but you’re valued!
Customer support is by no means the easiest role in an organization, but your continual work brings so much value. To your customers, you are a hero if you do things well and an enemy if not. So, the question that arises is what is considered “doing things well”? That’s up to you to define with your customer! If you consistently get poor reviews from your customers, but think you are doing everything right, sit down with that customer and figure out why. Remember that you are not your customer, so you can attempt to put yourself in their shoes all you want, but it will never yield the exact results you need. It is an excellent practice always to view things through the lens of your customer, but it is hard to have the same experiences as them.Implementing AV can be very hard because our goal is to design user-friendly and seamless systems. As technologists, what is user-friendly to us is probably not user-friendly to our customers. In higher ed, the true end customer is the student, and while the faculty is your direct customer, we deploy systems to help them serve their customers (the students). So when you are designing and supporting your systems, think about the student learning experience. If the system takes you 3 minutes to get up and running, faculty will likely need more time. If students wait 10 minutes to start an hour-long class, it may be time to reevaluate the process and see how it could be more effective. If you talk with your customers, though, and they provide specific feedback, use that feedback and talk to other customers to see if they have the same experience. Although we cannot often make every change that every customer asks for, there is generally a compromise to help solve some issues. The first step of even listening to your customer’s feedback will make you a hero in their eyes.
To your organization, your role is to keep others across the org chart in line with the customer experience. The disconnect between IT and the customer in many institutions is very dramatic. Your role as a direct supporter of the customer is to remind your fellow technical resources that the student experience still exists. We get so caught up in burying our heads in our work that we often forget students are coming to learn, which is the institution’s primary goal. If you can be this source of knowledge for those people, you can make a significant difference in how customers are served. This changes the priority levels of certain things and allows you to get what you need to be successful. All of the other projects going on around campus are important but should take the backseat to successfully supporting your students and faculty in the classroom.
So whether you hear it often or not, know that you bring value to your customers and your organization. Higher education is incredible when you get back to understanding why you are doing what you do. Your “small” part in providing technology and support is why someone can successfully learn and go on to do incredible things. It may not always feel like that when people are upset, and things aren’t working perfectly, but that is your purpose at the end of the day.
Happy holidays everybody, and I look forward to chatting with you all in 2022!