Building a customer focus in I.T.
Information technology is about customers. Often in the modern world, technology governs how our customers interact with the organisation. It has become the portal through which customers form their first impression of an organisation and a way of judging what that organisation can do for them. That’s why every information technology manager should be looking to hire people with a customer-oriented skillset as well as technical expertise.
Every time one of our customers engages with our organisation, they expect us to know who they are, to demonstrate a personal level of service, and to create a frictionless experience that delights them. They expect us to already know if they’re having an issue and to be ready to offer relevant guidance, counsel and help. From a technology point of view, it can be summed up as know me, show me you care, help me and make it easy.
That means we need technology people who are responsive to customer needs and that means we need every IT team member to see and behave through the business lens.
A UX expert reminded me that the “customer is the expert in the customer experience”. Hence, the best approach is to build a team with a customer-oriented skill set. Customer needs are changing almost as quickly as technology itself. So rather than trying to predict what customers will want down the track it makes much more sense to build a team that can understand customers and build IT systems that can flex and adapt quickly to customer needs as they arise.
We want technologists that design with ‘making it easy’ the primary objective. We want technologists who can adapt their design to changing customer needs. We want technologists who can create test-and-learn environments quickly so they can figure out what’s working, what isn’t, and change accordingly. We want technologists that will use analytics from a variety of sources to show our customers that they know them, that they care about them and that they want to help them.
All of this requires IT to re-position itself as a strategic partner for the business and recognise that the business is IT’s biggest customer. We must talk to the rest of the organisation about their business goals rather than our IT processes. We must solve short-term business needs when they are urgent and solve the root cause later. We must show them that we are excited to meet their challenges rather than how excited we are about the technology.
People skills are the key to an effective IT department. All of us need to learn to respect the knowledge and expertise of our customers and empathise with their frustration. Then, and only then, can we use our own knowledge and expertise to minimise that frustration and combine it with the customers’ to solve the problems.
