By Archie Messenger

This morning it came to me that I have been in the computer business for 38 years, and while the technology changes rapidly the thing that makes it work either for you or against you is the people involved.  I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly in solutions presented to a customer,  and I've seen a customer take a good design and turn it to the dark side. This is mostly caused by other people in the equation not understanding their job.

If you are in the customer service business and you truly plan to partner with your customer. You have to realize that telling them no -and sometimes NO in emphatic terms- may be the right answer. Contrary to the customer service motto that "the customer is always right," the customer may be wrong sometimes.  If that's the case, the customer needs to know that he is going down a path that will lead to bad things, an awkward use of the systems and applications to a complete disaster.  After all, customers hire you for your experience and knowledge, and you owe it to them to speak up even if it could start a difficult conversation.

How you tell him this however is the key to (and art of) good customer service.  If you're good at your job, you can respectfully explain things to a customer in such a way that he will embrace your ideas as his own, realize he was about to go down the wrong path, and get on the right path without reservation.

This is not to say you can have a magic wand that will solve all problems.  You can lead a horse to water and show him it is wet but he still may not drink. These are the times where you have to stick by him allow him to make the mistake and then help clean up after it is over without ever telling him I told you so. Partnering is a long road- not the short answer to a solution.

At the end of the day, we're not in this business to get recognized as the heroes who solve a difficult problem with any of the systems we support.  We're really here to support the people responsible for those systems.  We make them look good by helping them any way we can, and by building a strong relationship with them we are able to be more efficient at sharing our knowledge and experience- and ultimately better at helping them achieve the results they want to achieve for their businesses.  If you support technology, maybe you fix some bugs and replace some hardware from time to time, but if you support people you can really get things done.