I’d like to share with you a recent customer service interaction I experienced. My father just turned—let’s say a significant age—and I wanted to get him something special. When I was home last August, I spotted three old sheriff’s badges mounted artfully in a shadow box in one of our favorite shops. (My dad is a cowboy trapped in a CPA’s body.) Since it had been the better part of a year since I had been there I wasn’t sure if it was still available. I called the store a couple of weeks ago to inquire, and the woman, Sarah, assured me she had enough stock for me to figure out whether I should ship it or if my aunt could pick it up.

The day before the big birthday, I called Sarah back to purchase. She had already pulled the best one from stock and held it for me, and she didn’t even know exactly when my dad’s birthday was. We completed the credit card transaction when she offered to wrap it for me and have it ready in an hour for my aunt to pick up. In all, we spent over 5 minutes on the phone making small-talk, laughing, and figuring out that Sarah used to work with my parents at the resort where they had their coffee shop! My dad loved the gift, was completely surprised I remembered it from last summer, and was impressed I coordinated the exchange from 800 miles away.

I believe that excellent customer service principles translate across all business, so I can adapt this example from retail to our work in IT at Fandotech:

• She anticipated my needs and pulled the best sheriff’s badge shadow box for me. Whenever possible, the field technicians and I try to anticipate what parts they should bring onsite based on the symptoms we’re hearing. We don’t have shelves full of parts ready to go out the door, but we often have at least a test modem, video card, patch cables, etc. that the techs can use to help troubleshoot with a minimum of wasted time for you.
• She made me feel like a valued customer even though what I was buying wasn’t expensive. There are items in that store that reach and exceed $1,000 and would warrant special gift wrap and a little extra attention. Fandotech has customers that range from spending very little with us to using us for their entire network and hardware solutions. Our goal is to help all our customers feel valued regardless of what they pay. We never know when attention to the smaller items will translate to a bigger project.
• She established immediate rapport and created a certain trust and comfort level that continues even now. When I go back to Northern Michigan this summer, I already have on my itinerary to visit Tampico in Leland and hopefully meet Sarah in person and buy some beautiful Mexican jewelry from her. It can be difficult to establish rapport with a customer who is dealing with a major server or hosting meltdown, but we still try to match that sense of urgency, assure the customer we are doing our best, and deliver a quick resolution. Then when the customer is dealing with a less urgent issue we can continue to demonstrate our professionalism—maybe even have a couple of laughs!
• My positive experience has renewed my loyalty to her business. Not only do I plan to purchase from that store this summer, but I know I can call Sarah to help me with upcoming present ideas for my entire family. Her level of service encourages me to tell my friends and family how helpful she was and hopefully create more business for her store. At Fandotech, we hope that when you have a positive customer service experience you’ll share that with us as well as your friends and colleagues. Even more important, if you ever feel you’ve received a negative service experience please let us know. We always welcome your feedback and want the chance to make a wrong situation right.

A new feature of our website is “Dear Sarah” where you can email me questions or comments related to IT and customer service. I encourage you to contact me to introduce yourself if we haven’t corresponded yet, share ideas about how I, along with the rest of the Fandotech team, can make your experience better, or what kinds of information would be useful for me to share in the column. As for Tampico in Leland, MI I think I need to have a conversation with Sarah about having us create and host their website and e-commerce so I can order what I want online any time of day…

Sarah C. Marino

Hello. My name is Sarah Marino, and I don’t have an IT background. In fact, I don’t have advanced knowledge of special applications, I can’t tell you how to get rid of viruses on your computer, and I don’t spend my spare time gaming or reading about computers and networks. Until a few weeks ago, I thought a NetApp was the one appetizer left over from a party. Nevertheless, I feel I help fill an important role here at Fandotech.

My official title is “Dispatch and Ticket Management,” which means I schedule all the field work , including coordinating projects with the project managers, and I follow up on service tickets worked on by the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) and field technicians. Before I continue, I have to qualify what I am going to say: the Fandotech team is filled with smart, talented, amazing people who have the ability to solve every problem I’ve thrown at them on behalf of our customers. However, sometimes with exceptional knowledge and expertise in an area, common sense can be taken for granted. There’s that classic urban myth/anecdote about the 18-wheeler that gets stuck in a tunnel and all these engineers, the fire department, and the police can’t figure out a way to remove it until a little girl (in my anecdote it’s a girl) in a passing car suggests letting the air out of the tires. At Fandotech, I’d like to think that I, along with a handful of others, occasionally help let the air out of the tires.

Jack Bauer, 24, Copyright Twentieth Century Fox

I work very closely with the TAC every day and help determine the escalation path for service tickets for managed service customers. So, when one of the technicians mentions he can’t solve an issue remotely and it needs to be escalated to a field technician, I start asking questions:  Is it just this user experiencing slowness when opening Outlook or is it the whole office? When did it start? Jack Bauer was onsite last week—have you called him for assistance? Sometimes my questions don’t help get an immediate solution because the technician has already dutifully asked them or they are extremely basic, but every once in a while they will spark a new train of thought that ultimately leads to a quicker resolution.

The fact that I interface with all the departments and both locations at Fandotech is advantageous to the team. Sometimes I hear information in one meeting that is useful to people in another, and I try to pass that along even if it seems unrelated. When I hear the technicians and engineers talking about challenging issues, most of it goes over my head. Instead I try to think what the customer would ask if they could hear the conversation—could my network connectivity problems in one location be related to the circuit in the other? What could be going on between 12pm and 1pm that makes my server spontaneously restart every 4th day? We have many customers who are much more technically-savvy than I who ask incredibly detailed questions, and I try to take as many notes as possible and ask as many follow-up questions as I can think of. I never know if any of that information, even the smallest detail, might be useful to the team. Sometimes I won’t know the right follow-up questions to ask, but hopefully I will the next time thanks to my handy technicians.

For some people, simply talking about the problem and trying to put it in plain English, for people like me, is part of their problem-solving process. Answering my questions or explaining the resolution to me may help the technicians get their language customer-ready. And sometimes,when I tell them to take a mental break or that it’s okay to ask someone else for help, that’s just what they need to hear to get to a solution. Hey, anything I can do to help!

Perhaps I don’t have any technical certifications and I can’t customize my own Linux server for home use, but I do have at least one valuable asset in common with our technical team—curiosity. And if my curiosity and desire to get a problem resolved for a customer ends up helping the team in some small way, I’ve done my non-IT job.

Sarah C. Marino

I’ve been in customer service since I was 8 years old. My father and stepmother purchased a small retail space at the base of the ski slopes at a resort in Northern Michigan. They served coffee, cappuccino, pastries, freshly squeezed OJ, magazines, and sundries to the guests who hailed from the Detroit and Chicago areas. At first, I think they brought me into the shop with them because they had nowhere else to put me! We opened at 6:30am and left after 5:00pm, so there was no way I could be home alone that long. I began pouring coffee and putting out the fresh pastries and graduated to hand-squeezing the oranges and making room deliveries. I was a shy girl, but I quickly warmed to the attention by watching my stepmother interact with everyone. The tips I made for deliveries didn’t hurt either!

Every time I visited them from Boston, I worked at Maxfield Cook in the mornings. And every time I returned I saw customers I knew. I started to see what it was like to form relationships with customers and how important that was to the success of the business. We could anticipate people’s orders and how they took their coffee; we saved the last pecan roll for that one person who showed up long after they sold out, and we ordered that obscure newspaper for the gentleman who visited for two weeks in August. I would listen to my parents talk over dinner about how good it felt to make a difference in someone’s day with something as simple as a good cup of coffee and a warm smile.

I remember the first time I didn’t provide good customer service quite vividly. We were running low on milk, so I swiped the ceramic cow from between our favorite elderly couple for someone else’s coffee. A few minutes later, my stepmom asked, “Where did you find that?” When I told her, her eyes grew wide, “Did you ask them first?” My heart sank. It never occurred to me. They needed the milk for their granola, and now there was none left. She made me apologize to them. I was sobbing, red-faced, and mortified. Our favorite couple softened and said it was OK, and my stepmom was embarrassed at my reaction. Sure, I was a little sensitive, but it was the first time I really felt that I had let a customer down and I took it personally.

There were some not-so-nice customer experiences as well. We had people who insisted loudly that the coffee was burned even though we just made it and forced us to make a whole new pot and waste the perfectly good one we had.  Some would make fun of the name of the business and tell us it was stupid (It was my stepmom’s father’s middle name and my father’s mother’s maiden name). And others would yell at us for seemingly no reason at all. I would get upset and say mean things about them when they left. My stepmom would let me vent and then say, “Well, we don’t know them. Maybe they got some bad news.” I would roll my eyes and get in one last jab, but that idea stuck with me.

Since that time almost every job I’ve had has been customer service in one form or another. At each one I learn a little more about people and a lot more about patience. And at each job I have experiences that I treasure—laughing with customers at inside jokes, going the extra mile for customers when they least expect it, and anticipating their needs before they even think of them. I even cherish the more challenging experiences like when a customer yelled at me for ten minutes straight because she missed her massage appointment because she didn’t leave the mall on time. Did I secretly wish a pox upon her? Sure! But I also learned to listen to her and separate her emotions from my job. She returned for her rescheduled appointment and apologized to me for her behavior. She said she was embarrassed that I treated her so kindly after all her abuse. I told her we all have bad days.

I’m not here to tell you I’m a saint or that I give the best customer service 110% of the time. I’m as human as everyone else and have my fair share of bad days when I can’t provide the level of service customers deserve.  Providing good customer service in an IT company like Fandotech is especially challenging. Every phone call and email we receive is from a person or company with a problem we need to solve right away. Every person who calls or emails us is experiencing pain and inconvenience, and every company is worried about losing productivity and business until we can fix it. I won’t lie to you—that’s not the easiest thing to walk into every day! But I know at Fandotech that I’m working with the best team of people around, and I can say with confidence that we all do our absolute best for each and every customer. We’re going to miss a project deadline or have a challenge getting a server up and running before the start of the school day every once in a while. As long as each job has a positive customer experience I consider that a success. Sometimes that means a customer giving me feedback when he feels his issue wasn’t addressed in a timely manner or expressing disappointment when a technician shows up an hour late. When a customer trusts me with that kind of information I know we’re on the right path, I’m doing what I have been trained to do, and I can help the team provide a superior customer service experience the next time.

When I feel a little beaten and I’m having a difficult conversation with a customer I have to remember that they aren’t yelling at me.  They’re frustrated and stressed and most likely there’s a boss that is yelling at them because something is broken. Despite the drama of servers crashing, hard drives failing, PCs blue-screening, and networks dying there is a human being on the other end of that phone or email. So I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and remember that each interaction with customers is an opportunity to make a positive difference. And I always try have a good cup of coffee thanks to our resident barista, Craig Samson, and a warm smile on the other end of the phone or internet connection.

Sarah C. Marino