Starting on: thoughts on internal customer service

It's weird how normal ordinary things set my mind off in interesting tangents. Here's today's latest gem:

I figured I would go to Subway after church to take advantage of the "five-dollar-footlooooong" promotion they're running. However, this particular one I picked had such disastrous customer service that I did two things I don't normally do:
(a) placed a call to the owner's "call me" hotline for customer comments, and
(b) thought about how I do my job, serving our students, teachers, and administrators, would affect how they live and play within the rules or be tempted to break them.

Think about it... if we as IT people don't really attempt to communicate with the people we serve, or even actively try to keep them at a distance using attitude and jargon, that's one more reason for them not to seek our help in the future. Which can lead to frustrated users, pockets of "shadow IT" out in the schools, or outright conflict.

I'll leave with one case in point. I found out recently a teacher brought in her computer to use in class equipped with a cell network card, like the ones from Sprint, Verizon, ATT, and so on. What bothers me is that it was done to BYPASS OUR WEB FILTERING. IN FRONT OF HER CLASS. Instead of telling us something useful for class was blocked and making us aware of the problem so we could fix it with her, she chose to go around us entirely. Along with possibly pursuing disciplinary action against this teacher for an action clearly in violation of our policy, I have to ask what we could have done differently to accommodate this teacher's needs (in this case it was to show a YouTube video) that would have been within our policy and guidelines. I figure if one did this there are certainly more who would consider doing this. What about our process needs to change so people will involve us, not go around us? And certainly, the way this is handled will determine whether more people tell us what's wrong so we can help them, or not tell us because they'll be afraid of disciplinary action, or rather find another way around that just might break the rules again. I'm sure you out there have other instances...

In short, I can't assume "no news is good news", in fact, no news could mean people don't want our help.

I apologize in advance that I probably won't be able to respond fully to any comments or questions for a while (more of that pesky personal life stuff) but go ahead, let me know. I'll eventually try to tackle it on the blog somewhere in a future post.