The Day You Stopped Being a Client and Became a Ticket
You are not a client, you are a ticket
There is a certain size of IT company where you stop being a business and start being a reference number.
Nothing rude ever happens, mind you. Everyone is perfectly polite, the portal is slick, the hold music is inoffensive and the automated reply thanking you for your enquiry lands within seconds. Then, nothing.
So you ring. Whoever picks up is friendly, capable and has never once set foot in your building. They do not know you have two sites, they have no idea which of them is the awkward one and they certainly do not know that your line of business software throws a strop at half four on a Friday when the whole office runs the same report at once. You explain it from the beginning, to a name you have not heard before and you will explain it all over again next month to somebody else.
That is the part that grates. You are doing the handover yourself, every single time, for a job you thought you were paying somebody else to do.
Then the response times drift. Nothing dramatic, nothing you could put in a complaint letter, just four hours quietly becoming tomorrow. A ticket gets closed because nobody answered a question you never actually received. Somebody offers to escalate it and escalation turns out to mean the same queue wearing a different colour.
Big is not automatically bad and I would never pretend otherwise. Scale buys round the clock cover and security kit that a small firm could only dream of. But scale gets paid for somewhere and it is very often paid for out of the bit where somebody knows who you are.
So it is worth a think. When you ring your IT provider, does the person who answers know your name, your building, your people and the one thing that always goes wrong, or are you right back at the beginning again?
If it is the second one, that is worth a conversation and not necessarily with me.
Jacqui
J & J Systems, Canterbury
