Beware IT disease EDITORIAL GLASS CANADA June 2018 Volume 30 • Number 3 Annex Business Media P.O. Box 530, Simcoe, Ontario N3Y 4N5 EDITOR | Patrick FLANNERY pflannery@annexbusinessmedia.com 226.931.0545 ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER | Danielle LABRIE dlabrie@annexbusinessmedia.com 519.429.5187 ACCOUNT COORDINATOR | Stephanie DeFIELDS sdefields@annexbusinessmedia.com 519.429.5196 | 888.599.2228 ext. 257 MEDIA DESIGNER | Emily SUN DIRECTOR OF SALES/GROUP PUBLISHER | Martin McANULTY mmcanulty@annexbusinessmedia.com COO | Ted MARKLE tmarkle@annexbusinessmedia.com PRESIDENT & CEO | Mike FREDERICKS Publication Mail Agreement #40065710 Printed in Canada ISSN 0843-7041 CIRCULATION email: asingh@annexbusinessmedia.com Tel: 416-510-5189 Fax: 416-510-6875 (main) 416-510-5133 Mail: 111 Gordon Baker Rd., Suite 400, Toronto, ON M2H 3R1 SUBSCRIPTION RATES Canada -1 Year $36.75 (includes GST) ($39.55 includes HST/QST) U.S.A. -1 Year $50.00 (in US dollars) Occasionally, Glass Canada will mail informationon behalf of industry-related groups whose products and services we believe may be of interest to you. If you prefer not to receive this information, please contact our circulation department in any of the four ways listed above. Annex Privacy Officer privacy@annexbusinessmedia.com Tel: 800-668-2374 No part of the editorial content of this publication may be reprinted without the publisher’s written permis-sion. ©2018 Annex Publishing & Printing Inc. All rights reserved. Opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the editor or the publisher. No liability is assumed for errors or omissions. All advertising is subject to the publisher’s approval. Such approval does not imply any endorsement of the prod-ucts or services advertised. Publisher reserves the right to refuse advertising that does not meet the standards of the publication. A creeping corporate mould from the black depths of Silicone Valley. I feel I can get away with throwing some shade at an entire profession as I was once employed on the outskirts of it myself. Many years ago when I was between jobs I worked in a call centre for a big American telecommunications provider doing tech support for their web portal. Our explicit instructions were to get the customer off the phone as fast as possible. Indeed, our entire job performance metric depended on it. We were told to look first and foremost for evidence that the customer’s problem was arising from something that wasn’t the contractor’s fault (for instance, a problem with Windows, or the hardware, or In-ternet Explorer) and to direct them to seek support from one of those providers. We were strongly discouraged from offering any help with these sorts of issues, even if we knew how to fix the problem and could do so fairly quickly. Of course, not viewing my job there as a career option, I went ahead and gave each caller all the help I could. Which, ironically, led me to have one of the highest performance ratings in the company. It’s funny how just changing a few security settings takes less time than persuading a customer to go away and make another call after they’ve already been on hold for half an hour. You see, I’m not a fan of the effect information technology has had on customer service. I still remem-NEXT ISSUE ber my shock in 1992 when, having bought my first PC • Bass and failed in my attempts to decipher the Bible-sized Installations DOS manual that came with it, I found that there was • Fabrication simply no in-person help available. When I called the store I bought it from, I was told they only handle Equipment hardware issues and couldn’t help me with anything software-related. I was directed to a phone number. We’ve gotten so used to this most of you won’t see the problem. But at the time it was a major paradigm shift. I’d just bought an expensive item from a local retailer. Up until that point, it was assumed that a retailer had to stand behind what they sold and make some attempt to ensure customer satisfaction. But instead, this company felt free to pawn me off on its supplier on the other side of the continent. For some reason I have never been able to discover, this was OK because the product was software. Since it was a new thing to buy, new rules applied. Once other sectors saw what the software industry was getting away with, it didn’t take them long to seize the opportunity to withdraw their investments in customer service. It’s commonplace now to be unable to get service or support from a retailer on anything from power tools to TVs. My curse is to look for root causes in everything and the cause I see here is something I’ll call IT disease. It comes from the dislike engineers have for dealing with humans and all their ignorance and messy unpredictability. This translates into a certain workplace culture where human problems are deflected or ignored, often with an attitude of arrogant impatience. As corporate diseases go, it’s one of the worst as it leads to resentment, backbiting and, ultimately, nothing getting done. How do you prevent IT disease in your organization? • @GlassCanadaMag www.glasscanadamag.com 4 June 2018 | GLASS CANADA
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