I recently met with one of our customers about our IT Service Delivery. I went into the meeting thinking that GAD Group was going to get high marks for solving issues and responding to requests in a timely fashion. After all, our status reports looked impressive showing great productivity numbers. Additionally, we had previously taken care of some critical issues for this decision maker within the customer account. So my thoughts were that the customer would just reap praise on us for our "excellent" work.
As the meeting progressed, The decision maker in the meeting squarely pointed to a support ticket that had been opened for several weeks with no resolution. When they showed me the issue, in my mind, I remembered talking about the issue in one of our team conference calls or staff meeting. I was totally surprised when they brought up the issue. As I reviewed the ticket, I noticed the tech assigned to the issue was not persistent at all, didn't follow-up with the vendor, nor did he perform any research to see if he could come up with an alternative solution.
Consequently, I personally took care of the issue and followed up with the user to make sure they was happy with the solution. I took responsibility for the issue and covered for the tech.
The lesson here is that customers make mental notes about things we think are trivial. Lingering open issues get more attention than closed solutions/successes.
Take a minute and review your customer's open support tickets, follow-up with the customer on the open ones and make sure you communicate that you're on top of the situation. And remember, leverage your teammates for assistance and advice.
