Does your typical IT employee have customer-facing skills?
These days technology is increasingly instrumental to the marketing, selling, ordering, processing, and delivery of any product or service. As noted on this site and elsewhere, IT needs to understand external customers, learning their needs, and taking their preferences into account before any new system is launched. All of this suggests that IT should get involved early on in discussions with customers, provide customers with direct contacts within IT, and attend meetings with them.
There’s just one question. Are technology staff ready for prime time?
I keep thinking back to a story told by Leading Geeks author Paul Glen about a company that took one of its engineers on a sales call. The engineer, who had looked around the customer's data center noted that many servers were running an operating system he disapproved of. Only an idiot would have installed it, he declared blandly during a meeting with the customer. He clearly had no idea that he’d done anything wrong. Needless to say, Glen adds, there was no sale.
So today’s IT leaders face a challenge. If technology staff increasingly must meet directly with external customers, how do you make sure they’ll be effective representatives of your organization?
- Mix them in. This is one of many reasons to resist the temptation to put technology people off in their own space, away from the rest of the building where they can dress as informally as they please, and no one will notice the odd hours they keep. Tech people need to interact with their business colleagues every day, informally as well as on cross-functional teams. One easy way to make sure this happens is to put them in the same physical space.
- Give them training. I know, I know — they’ll complain that learning “soft skills” is a waste of time. They may be disdainful of communication and sales skills, until you point out that it’s tough to advance to management levels without them. Sending team members to embed with marketing or sales for a while before they go out to meet customers might be a big help.
- Have marketers within IT. Some of the smartest IT organizations are hiring specialists in various business functions to work within IT. Having people within IT with some level of marketings know-how will strengthen your organization in a number of ways. For one, it will help you better serve the marketing department, increasingly the biggest user of new technology. And it’ll ensure that, when it’s time for IT to join in sales calls, you’ll have team members available who are good at it.
What do you think? Are your IT people customer-ready?
Read, "Four ways to help the business understand what IT is talking about."
Minda Zetlin is co-author of The Geek Gap: Why Business and Technology Professionals Don't Understand Each Other and Why They Need Each Other to Survive. Learn more at www.mindazetlin.com.
