Proper communication is one of most useful skills in any workplace. In this video, you’ll learn best practices for avoiding jargon, maintaining a positive attitude, setting expectations, and more.
We often think that a knowledge of operating systems, security, networking, and other technologies is our most important skills when trying to troubleshoot a problem. But in reality, communication tends to be the issue where people tend to run into problems. And in a way, this does make sense. We do spend a lot of time trying to understand the nuances of the latest operating system or the internals of a particular application.
But how often do we spend time really understanding how to communicate with other people? One of the things that I have realized during my career in IT is that the communication skills that you have are extremely marketable. And the better you are at communicating with other people, the higher you’ll move up within the IT ranks.
In technology, we love to abbreviate. Our acronyms tend to be littered in all of our documentation. And we tend to use shortcuts and abbreviations when describing technology topics.
When you’re communicating with other technologists, those abbreviations are perfectly reasonable. But when you’re discussing problems with a third party or with your customer, it might be better to use a different set of terms. Your goal is to be the translator between the technical world and the world that they work in. And very often, this means that you’re avoiding any use of acronyms or any technological slang.
The people in charge of the organization have not spent their entire career in the world of information technology, but they are very good at taking all of the information in and making a business decision. Your goal should be to present the information in a very easy-to-follow form that anyone would be able to understand. Thankfully, this is a problem that’s relatively easy to avoid. You just have to put yourself in the shoes of the other person and explain it as if you were someone who was not involved in the world of technology.
The attitude that you have during your normal workday is infectious. If you have a positive attitude, you’ll find that the people around you also have a positive attitude. When you’re communicating with other people, you should be partnering with them and talking with them as an equal. This is something that will provide confidence and show people that you are willing to do the work. This can also help when you run into those rare technology problems that simply can’t be resolved.
If someone has stored all of their personal information on a storage drive, and that storage drive has failed with no ability to recover any of that information, it becomes a difficult conversation. But it always helps if you maintain a positive attitude and give people different options for moving forward from this issue. We’re very often working with these customers many times a day over a number of weeks or even months. So it’s important to keep in mind that your attitude has a direct impact on the overall customer experience.
As humans, we have a desire to be the smartest one in the room and to make sure that people understand that we know this technology that we’re working with. But what we don’t want to do is interrupt people when they’re in the middle of describing the problems that they’re having or the issues associated with a particular ticket. So we should work on getting into a habit where we spend much more time asking questions and listening than we do talking and interrupting.
There have been many times where customers tried to explain a particular problem, and the technologist interrupts before they even get to the key point of the issue. We sometimes assume we know what the issue happens to be, but until we’ve heard the entire story, we can never know for sure. This is not only important when you’re face to face with an individual, but it’s especially important when you’re on a conference call or a phone call. You want to be sure that the person you’re talking to knows that they’ve been heard.
And you want to be sure that you collect all of the important details that will help you solve this problem. I found this to be a very difficult skill to perfect, not only for myself, but for other people that I’ve worked with. But if you spend your time understanding when would be the appropriate time to listen and when the appropriate time would be to talk, you’ll find that the entire troubleshooting process moves along much smoother.
Another thing that we don’t tend to spend enough time doing is asking questions about what the customer is seeing. They are the way that we drill down into the details of the problem. And very often, we assume or make a judgment call on what we think the problem might be. But in reality, we should have asked more probing questions to understand details about the issue.
I also find a useful task is to listen to everything the customer is telling me about the issue, make notes on exactly what they’re saying, and then repeat back to them the information that I heard. Often this matches exactly what they’ve said. But sometimes they will clarify a point that I may have gotten wrong.
This is not only an important part of building good teamwork, but it’s also an important part of solving the problem. Even after the customer has spent their time talking about the issue, and you might even have a very good feeling of what might solve this problem, it’s often good to ask clarifying questions to see if perhaps it’s not exactly what you were thinking at first. You might often find that what you believe the problem to be originally is very different in reality.
It’s often said, that expectation is reality, and there’s no better truth than when you’re working on a technical problem. It’s always good to give people options and have them understand what the potential might be in almost any scenario. For example, there may be an option to repair a system, or it might be an option to replace. You should explain both sides of this situation and have them understand what the advantages and disadvantages might be of either decision.
I also find it useful to follow up with a technical conversation over the phone using email. This way, the problem itself is well-documented and both parties are on the same page because everything has been documented in an email. Sometimes these issues may drag on for weeks or even months, especially if you’re waiting on parts to be delivered by a manufacturer.
One thing you might want to do is set a reminder in your calendar to have this customer contacted once a week. Even if we’ve not heard anything from the manufacturer, we can still let the customer know that we are still involved with troubleshooting this issue and we haven’t forgotten about them. This is a very simple thing to do, but it can be very important for making people understand that you are on top of the problem and you’re going to take care of resolving their issue.
And after you close a ticket, it’s always a good idea to check in with the customer and see if their problem really was resolved to their satisfaction. Very often, they’ll say, there’s nothing else to do, and you can continue to the next ticket. But occasionally they’ll mention that there is one extra thing that needs to be resolved to get this to 100% resolution. And that might have been a minor issue that could have been easily resolved, that would have otherwise slipped through the cracks.