A New Generation Marketer

In any industry, the most underrated asset is usually staring you in the face- Your clients. That’s not more management science mouthwash, it’s an established fact, as anyone with real customer service experience can tell you. Your clients in IT support are your early warning system, your built in feedback mechanism, and above all your quality controls. Clients are better placed than anyone to be aware of what’s happening in your territory, and they’re the best information base in the world.

Customizing your client relationships

If you’re an expert in your field, you’ll already know the story about dealing with people having limited knowledge in your area. They don’t know your problems. That, ironically, is the basis of one of the major assets clients can provide. They can’t speak your language too well, but they can tell you what’s bothering them and give you their perspectives. They do know their own problems very well, and that’s what you need to know.

The key to client relationships is customer expectations.

If you meet or exceed customer expectations, you’re a saint. If you don’t, or if they don’t understand what you’ve done, you’re the bad guy. There’s the key to good client relationships, right there. It’s also the key to not getting phone calls from your boss asking you what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

The trick is simple, and effective:

• Get more information about what the client needs. This will inevitably produce more useful information, and extend the logic of the work that needs doing, so you don’t do a fix and find you’ve actually not solved the real problems.

• Get familiar with the client’s objectives, particularly the business objectives. Your work is central to the client’s business. The more you know about the issues, the more effective your solutions will be from the client’s perspective.

Building in your own quality controls

The client needs a specific result, and you need to know how to obtain that result. The client doesn’t know how to get that result, but you can get that information quite easily.

You’ll naturally make a lot of contacts on the job in IT services, and you can select the more observant, better informed people in the client’s workplace as your best contacts:

• The secretary will probably know more about the manager’s IT needs than the manager.

• The accountancy department will be fully up to speed on whacko software and database problems.

• The floor manager will be able to tell you everything that’s gone wrong with the data entry for years.

• The core business workers know everything in any workplace. If you’re client’s a retailer, talk to the cashiers, their supervisor and whoever does the inventory, and you’ll get all the information you could ever need.

The net outcome will be that your work will always be high quality. The client will be very happy, and probably ask for you to do the servicing in future. And it’s all because you used your most reliable asset- Your clients.