Give the Lady What She Wants

A treatise on Customer Service in Information Technology – PART I

Cesar Ritz, the Swiss hotelier said, “If a diner complains about a dish or the wine, immediately remove it and replace it, no questions asked."

But with all due respect, it did not take a team of highly caffeinated engineers and designers to overcook the Filet Mignon that Mr. Ritz so gallantly replaced. When it comes to the business of Information Technology you can throw a lot of so called managerial wisdom out of the door, into the dustbin, onto the garbage truck and dispose of them as quietly and without sorrow. 

At Hashbrown Systems, we deal with a lot of business organizations that are late adapters of software solutions or that did not whole heartedly embrace the technology and managed business successfully without investing in Information Technology more than it was required or in some cases mandated by government policies.

Once the client decides to integrate technology, the first step is to converge the disconnect between the expectations of a customer who is taking a fresh plunge into information systems and the capability of the technology in delivering the desired solution. This gap has to be bridged and the expectations aligned with the deliverability.  

The second and most important step is educating the customer; customer may always be right but more often than not he is incognizant. The key here is to understand customer requirements better than the customer itself.  This is something easier said than done, especially when customers rarely are sure of what they want and it is our job to uncover their needs to serve the customer competently.

This might be the unpalatable bit but if a customer is unsure of the answer to your query, he will make it up. So it is the job of the service provider to have the answers and instead of fielding questions to the customer, we give our customer choices.

At Hashbrown Systems we look beyond what our customers say and ask and we invest time and resources to seek what the business really needs to succeed and function efficiently.