I Say: the Best Support is No Support

The easiest way to deal with complexity is to ignore it.

Well, at least that’s what some clients think when I meet with them to go over their computer problems. It’s amazing to me how accepting we’ve all become of computers and their subtle inconveniences. It’s like we’ve come to just tolerate failure from our technology.

We make excuses for it (“Well shoot, it looks like my darn computer is having a grumpy day!”), work around it (“Just click that button to clear the error and continue – it always does that …”), or simply push it aside (“Yeah, the customer database doesn’t work on this computer from time to time.”)

Still, we’re significantly less tolerant of technologies like electricity, plumbing, a microwave, or a washing machine. These things work thousands of times and for countless hours, and when there’s an inconvenient slip – BANG! – we’re all over that.

What shapes our expectation is consistency. And a lot of small business managers have diminished expectations over their technology. Suffering down-time, connectivity problems, system bugs, viruses, lost speed and performance, and data loss just seems routine. Hey, that’s business-as-usual. It’s expected. It’s better to just accept it or ignore it and move on.

What I’ve always asked is this: why can’t the tech that I manage be as reliable as the water? As predictable as the washing machine? As dependable as the electrical grid?

A lot of my work rests in changing my client’s expectations in that technology – if suitably managed and maintained – can be predictable, reliable, dependable. It can be clockwork. It just takes the requisite elbow-grease, time, and attention to set the foundation.

Instead of fixing stuff after the fact and reacting to problems, why can’t the problems be mitigated beforehand? Why can’t technology problems be anticipated and managed? Why can’t technical support be proactive instead of reactive?

Listen, we’re not trying to make a quick buck off of low expectations. We’re not eager to receive any phone call where a client is down and can’t serve their own customers. We don’t want to address the same issue twice, even if it’s billable time.

Heck no.

What we’re trying to do is turn our client’s technology into a utility – something that everyone, everywhere, can count on, and where failure is brief and infrequent, and I say: the best support is no support. Stuff just simply, consistently works. We pride ourselves when our customers have nothing to say but thanks.

That’s the expectation that I try to set with each and every one of our clients. And that’s just another idea that sets us apart from our competitors.

R

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