Failure to Communicate

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” This famous line from the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke seems to be spoken many times by Support Professionals, mainly in reference to inquiries by users who just don’t seem to “get it.” While it is spoken as an attempt at humor in sometimes difficult situations, it may be more of a truth that we suspect. It is not unusual in my role as Help Desk Manager to hear something similar to the famous quote from Help Desk Agents, Second Level Support groups, and the customers themselves. What’s amazing is the “failure to communicate” is not limited to Customer – Support relationships but seems to occur between groups and even within groups at times. Like in the picture to the right, we sometimes don't pay attention to what is being said around us in an effort to get our own message across.

For example, who hasn’t learned of a software upgrade or new product rollout from the customer BEFORE getting the information from the group responsible for the roll-out? One example from my own files is from a recent change in policy we made regarding how a certain issue was to be recorded in our Incident Management system. We communicated the change to the Help Desk Agents and Supervisors, documented the process and changes in our knowledge base, received buy-in from second level support groups and management and implemented the change. Sounds pretty solid, doesn’t it?  It did to me too, until the first reports came in which should have shown how compliant the enterprise was in the new recording processes. It was immediately clear we had forgotten to include a group in our communication plan. It was the Field Support personnel spread out around the world at our properties. While they had access to the same knowledge base the rest of the support organization uses, they were not directly informed about the change in process.

That was a big “Oh-No!” moment.  It was embarrassing to have to admit the mistake, but it exposed a gap in the centralized support organization’s communication plans and abilities. As a result of this breakdown, we did engineer a plan for future communication which would include the field support technicians. It also allowed us to open a channel of communication previously unused. Operational Support hosts a daily check-point meeting hosted by a member of the Change Management team every morning at 8am.  The meeting last no more than 10 minutes and reviews any major issues from the previous day and any open issues or up coming changes for the next 24 hours which might affect system stability or operational metrics. Regional field support management is now invited to this conference call to listen and give input back to the support organization as a whole.

What methods do you use to communicate within your support organization? What have you found to be most effective in communicating changes and issues to other groups in Support or to your customers in general?

Andy Glover

(Picture by gtmcknight used under Creative Commons license)

Andy Glover is a Help Desk Manager with over 17 years experience in Internal Information Technology Support, ten of those years in direct management of Support Professionals, across a wide variety of industries from manufacturing and financial, to hospitality and entertainment.  Andy is currently at Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc. based out of Memphis, TN where he is Global Enterprise Help Desk Manager

Comments

[Rich]

Andy: Great example! Communication is an area where there are so many channels and audiences it is hard to keep up. Sometimes we make assumptions that everyone else knows what we know so why do we need to say it?
I hear this from many organizations. It is an area we need to continually focus on and document so others realize how many audiences and methods of communication need to be considered when changes, rollouts, or information is important for the organization to know. Thanks...

Rich