A Few Minutes with AppleCare

A survey request I didn’t mind receiving

This was originally published on my other blog, but I think it works here, too. I know from comments I’ve received on previous posts that some of you are not fans of Apple. I’m not so much a fan of Apple, as I am a developer who has to work with Apple as we create iPhone/iPad Apps for our employees.

I’m not trying to convince you to buy an iPhone, an iPad or a Mac. I don’t care what you use to do your job, pay your bills, process your photos or write your blog. If you’re happy, I’m happy. I use my iPhone for nearly everything one can do with a phone these days. I use my iPad in support of business, especially while traveling. I write my blog, process my pictures and do the bulk of my job on Windows laptops. My wife pays the bills.

Regardless of what technology, platform (if my boss is reading this, his eyes just rolled) or operating system you’re using, occasionally, you need help. Sometimes, you have to deal with a large vendor’s myriad-level-deep-voice-mail-to-nowhere. Sometimes, your request is routed “off-shore.” Sometimes, you’re relegated to a web-based process, be it a chat or an email exchange. Quite often, you’re left on your own to google your way out of a deep hole.

When I began my call with Apple’s Developer Support Group, I wasn’t optimistic. Mine wasn’t a technical issue, it was an account governance issue, and our two development accounts with Apple are governed (on their end) by over 2,000 pages of terms. I can’t share the details of my issue (try to hide that smile), but I want to share six things that AppleCare did well. So well that I would recommend that any organization, technical or otherwise, steal these ideas. Seriously, steal them! This is one case where you want to be like Apple.

The questions speak to the things Apple is trying to achieve.

1) Four simple options – There was no guesswork involved in the simple voice mail prescreening message. Choices 1-3 were binary. They wanted to know if I was involved with three very specific things. I wasn’t, so I pressed 4 as instructed.

2) Hold Music Options – This is one thing that could make all tech-support / customer service so much better. I had the option to: hold with pop/rock, hold with classical music, hold with jazz or hold in silence. Please, steal this idea, even if you only add “hold in silence” as an option.

3) Fast & Accurate – I was expecting my ‘4 – other’ key press to lead me to a long wait. Instead, in under 3 minutes, a cheerful human being picked-up. Matt asked me several questions. He repeated back the important information, use phonetic “N as in Nancy” spelling to verify details like my email address, and he summarized my problem and stated his understanding of my objective. Oh my word, this guy actually wanted to make sure that he knew what I wanted as an outcome!

Unfortunately, after all the gathering, spell-checking and objective understanding, Matt couldn’t actually help me. But, he said that he knew the group who should be able to help me. Now you know as well as I do, that this is where customer service sinks into a frustrating, seemingly endless, often circular journey of despair. My experience was different:

4) Information gathered and provided – Matt asked for a callback number, in case his attempts to transfer me failed. He also gave me the direct number of the group that he was transferring me to. He put me on hold (previous options, still in effect) for what initially seemed like a long time. Then Matt came back on the line and introduced me to Ashley.

5) Amazing – Number five is now known as “The Amazing Number 5!” I’m talking five golden rings amazing. When Ashley picked up she said: “Matt briefed me on your issue.” What? What tech support school did you guys go to? I was expecting Ashley to start at the beginning, run me through all the questions and then punt me to some no-nothing-schlep who would repeat the process. I didn’t have to repeat anything. She began with a summary of my problem and my expectations, as she understood them. She was correct.

Ashley couldn’t help me achieve the objective I wanted, because Apple doesn’t permit the type of account management I wanted to establish. She did, however, offer an acceptable alternative. She carefully explained the alternative and I agreed that, while different than what I had hoped for, it would work just as well.

6) Insure success – Before hanging up, she asked me if I knew all the steps I had to complete and if I knew how to complete them. She listened while I explained my next steps, she confirmed that my understanding was correct, and she offered to stay on the line while I completed those tasks.

Except for maybe giving Ashley a sweet southern accent, I can’t imagine anything that could have improved my experience. Again, I’m not shilling for Apple, but I do think there are some lessons to be learned from this experience.

Face to Face

About 5 years ago we launched a project to give our customers access to certain key documents via an Internet-facing SharePoint site. We worked with a small group of beta users as we developed the site(s) and I gave a short presentation at our Policyholder Meeting later that year. The following year I conducted a training class at our Policyholder Meeting. For the past three years I have offered to meet, one-on-one with our customers to walk them through their specific site. These have been great meetings, but suffice it to say, they are different than giving a presentation, or conducting a class.

When we develop solutions on SharePoint internally, we have our coworkers to bounce ideas off of to help us perfect the design and to test the solutions with us. When we develop for our customers, we have to get it right without a lot of input, without the collaboration features of Lync and sometimes, without the benefit of their having an understanding of SharePoint. An interesting twist this year was the fact that every member of the original beta group is now retired.

I met with about 10 different people. Some were new to their role, taking the place of those retirees and some were relative old-timers. As I walked them through the features of the Policyholder Portal (yeah, I know…portal… well, it’s what we called it 5 years ago, so) they were generally impressed. My goal was to come away from these meetings with three things: happy customers, food for thought and happy customers. I put that in twice because I want them to be happy and my boss wants them to be happy. I also tried to pay attention to their general reaction, particularly the people who were seeing our site and perhaps SharePoint for the first time. I’ll save the specific enhancements I agreed to have my team make for later posts, but let me share the general observations.

Content – We have generally focused our development effort on improving the quality of the content available to our customers. This seems to have been the right play. They were impressed by the fact that they can directly access information that they used to have to ask for. Not that we were ever unresponsive in handling those requests, but the difference between the time it takes to send and receive a response to an email and immediate access is huge. Also, new people don’t always know what to ask for. If you don’t know what content is available, asking for it will consume several email cycles – browsing a site lets you figure it out on your own and that seems to be a very important benefit. In addition, two of our customers expressed an interest in working toward the goal of getting content out of email altogether.

Food for thought – add some guidance to the site to help people know what content is available and how to get to it.

Security – “How are you protecting my information?” That’s a question I was asked several times, and that’s a question that I am asking vendors in my supply chain. After months and months of watching leaks, breaches and spying being rolled out on the news, people are concerned about who has access to information about them. I explained what we do to protect their content, and I explained what we plan to do to improve that next year. They were happy to hear that this has always been a concern of ours and they were happier to hear that we aren’t resting on a five-year-old solution. When I explained that our plan for next year involves moving to SharePoint 365, they were less happy. Regardless of how secure a cloud-based solution is, it involves incorporating more people in that supply chain, and these days, nobody is happy with that thought.

Food for thought – Make sure the SharePoint 365 host we choose understands that security and confidentiality are important critical.

Process – One of the things people seemed to appreciate most was our effort to automate the transfer of content from our internal business process to the Internet-facing site. Automated processes insure that current content will be available in a timely manner. It’s not that our customers don’t trust our staff to do that job, but they like the idea that the process is on rails, so to speak.

Food for thought – Make sure that we can extend that process into SharePoint 365.

I wish I could have beamed a few people from Microsoft into these meetings. I wish I could put them face-to-face with my customers so they could see how important it is for SharePoint to grow in terms of those fundamental capabilities that caused us to buy it in 2006. Marching forward into “new ways of working” is important, but not if it comes at the expense of content, security, and process capabilities or improvements in those critical areas.

In Case You Missed Last Week

Last week, I wrote about customer service and why we (SharePoint/ECM/IT practitioners) should make it a priority. This week, I want to add a few thoughts to that argument from the customer point of view. I would suggest that if you don’t feel like reading this, then skip to the end, because after I turn this back to SharePoint, I have an announcement to make about something new on this blog.

In an earlier post on my personal blog, I ranted about how some things would end in 2012. I wasn’t trying to predict the future and I wasn’t reading the Mayan Calendar; I was simply announcing that I had reached a point where I could no longer tolerate certain behavior by services, marketers and vendors. Last week, something big changed at work, and I was both sad and proud to have made the decision to make the change. Without naming names, we dropped a vendor with whom we had once enjoyed a great relationship. Over the years, the vendor had moved from treating us like a good customer, to merely a customer to a revenue source and finally to a payable item; it was time to stop the bleeding.

I will point out that I wasn’t exactly suffering in silence with this vendor; I had complained numerous times, I had threatened to end this relationship and I had called every member of the account team that was handling our account. When I ignored the renewal invoice, I received an email chastising me for forgetting to pay for maintenance. I responded to that email by telling the maintenance service manager that I wasn’t sure we were going to renew the contract. I added a few of my reasons, let’s say enough to send the message that someone should call me. Instead of a phone call, I received another terse email and this time my boss was copied. Several days after the maintenance contract expired, I received an email from the Sales Manager asking if I wanted to talk about the changes they were making that he hoped would eliminate my problems – nope, too little, too late, color me gone.

Since I had been a customer of this company for over a decade, and since the sales manager did reach out to me, I felt he was entitled to an explanation. I didn’t really want to talk to him, but I wrote a lengthy (surprise) email detailing the history of our growing frustration. This is where I’m going to end the description of this saga and turn it back to SharePoint – your users aren’t going to be as considerate as I was. When your users get upset with you, your department, your solutions or your lack of attention to them, they are just as likely to move on without warning as they are to approach you for a discussion. I know of businesses around here that have fully licensed and provisioned SharePoint shops that are now also running a different ECM solution. I think just about every SharePoint professional knows of users that have gone off-grid and built their own SharePoint solutions, in fact some of you make a living supporting these rogue installations. From a customer point of view, customer service isn’t a luxury, it’s a requirement.

I feel better after having severed a relationship with an inattentive vendor, but I feel better still knowing that most of the vendors that we have chosen to work with are flat-out great organizations. If you’ve read this blog for very long, you know that I have called some of these people out on occasion for special recognition. Today, I am launching my “Who we like and why we like them” page. It’s not the most beautiful bit of HTML, but if you have been reading for a while, you remember that “make it work, then make it pretty…” mantra of mine. I wanted to say this and I didn’t want to wait until I could make it pretty. Please take a look at the page, and if you need the services that these people, companies and organizations offer, consider using them.

If You Have to Choose – Choose Customer Service

This is not going to be a religious post, but I was recently reminded of Matthew 6:24, where it is said that “No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other…” Of course, Matthew was talking about God and Money – I was reminded of this while thinking about serving employees and customers. For an IT guy designing an Internet-facing SharePoint site, the situation is similar; it’s hard to make both groups happy.

We are changing the way we present documents to our customers in an effort to make their lives easier. Of course that means that we have to work a little harder, spend a little more time fussing over each document and a set bunch of metadata, and since the documents we are making available to the customers are ones that we already store in-house, the extra work is being put into what many consider a duplicate copy.

This is when it helps to switch metaphors – in this case, we are not acting like Content Managers, we are acting like Librarians, you know the kind behind the desk of an actual library.

Librarians, and the other employees of a library system, spend an inordinate amount of time making it possible for their customers to be able to quickly find and access the content they need. I doubt very much that the librarian has read, or ever intends to read every book in the library, but that doesn’t impact his or her effort to organize those books, films, periodicals and other lending stock.

Hopefully I’ve made a case for doing the work, now let’s talk about how to make it easy, or at least less hard.

Business Process – By far, the easiest way to populate an additional or alternative library with content that has been processed in-house is to make the subsequent distribution part of the automated process. You may have read about the recent success that we had with this approach a few weeks ago when I was thanking HarePoint for coming to our rescue. When we took this approach, we made everyone happy and we scored bonus points. Our customers are happy to have access to the content. Our employees are happy that they don’t have to perform what they see as “extra” work. Most important, we demonstrated that we are willing to purchase software like HarePoint’s workflow extensions and take the time to build these solutions; that helps us establish credibility.

Workflows – While workflows lie at the heart of the automated business processes referenced above, they can also be useful in less elaborate scenarios. Small, single-purpose workflows can be deployed to help with complex tasks, and tasks that are hard to remember because they are performed infrequently. The added bonus of these workflows is that they are easy to understand, therefore they are easy to explain to people who want to know more about SharePoint – Well, this is a working theory.

Marketing – It may not appear that we are selling anything in this scenario, but we are; we are selling the whole concept of building a user-friendly customer-facing site. Another way to help our employees to get on board with this process is to share the results and share the credit. This isn’t a theory. Last week, I demonstrated the sites we are building for our customers to several of our customers at our annual Policyholder meeting. Everyone I talked to was impressed with the changes we had made and I made sure that I dropped the names of the people in the office who made these solutions happen. Now that I’m back, I’m telling the people in the office about the customer reactions.

Keeping everyone in the loop emphasizes the fact that this is a company solution that we are providing as a customer service. It’s not SharePoint, it’s business, SharePoint is just the conduit by which we deliver the service. SharePoint can either distance you from your customers by relegating them to a self-serve (think airlines) operation or it can connect you to your customers. In addition to naming names, we are building features into the customer sites for sharing other documents, for scheduling events and for making contact with people on both ends but those sound like topics for future posts.

Off to a Slow Start

We recently started working with a small group of people who are managing a very important project within our company. Most of them are familiar with SharePoint, but they aren’t comfortable designing a solution for themselves. That’s OK with me, they are doing the heavy lifting on this project; I am trying to prove that the “services” in Information Services, a.k.a. the department I manage, is there for a reason. We started off with a pile of documents in the Shared Documents library. Then I explained that

“absent some organization and metadata, the Shared Documents library is nothing more than a browser-based K: drive.”  

The conversation that ensued was typical of many that I have had with people who are either new to SharePoint, new to Content Management (ECM) or both. It went something like this:

Me: “Why have you decided to save these particular documents?”

Group: “Some of the documents are things we need for reference as we complete the project. Some are documents that we think may be important in the future when the next group that has to revise this process begins their task.”

Me: “How would you or others want to search for or find these documents? I.E. how do we make sure that we put them in the place where you will expect to find them.”

Group: “We don’t know.” 

These are talented, thorough and forward-thinking people, but they don’t have a crystal ball. We have been in business for over 50 years, and some of the plants that we started insuring in the early days, are still operating today. We are trying to decide how to organize information that may not be used again for 10 – 15 years; a point in time long after today’s group has retired. I recommended that we start slow, and I recommended that they come along for portions of the ride.

We met on Wednesday to pick a category that would be a logical place to put a bunch of documents that we know we want to keep – minutes and notes taken during meetings and events where the process they are revising has been discussed. I have to give these guys credit. In the absence of a well-organized library, they fell back on embedding information into the document titles, for example: “Minutes-fema-june-24-2012.” That is about the best you can do in a share drive, and it’s not a bad idea in SharePoint either, (if that document is removed from SharePoint, it still retains some metadata). Their concern was that they don’t know all the people and groups that they will have to meet with during the course of this project. I explained the three most obvious options:

• A Choice column that they maintain
• A Choice column that they maintain for important entries but also allow fill-in responses
• A Look-up List that they maintain

We opted for the Look-up List for two reasons. One, it is easier for a non-technical SharePoint user to add items to a custom list that it is for them to remember how to edit Library Settings. Two, the custom list driving the Lookup process can be used in other libraries.

Their next question stemmed directly from their previous experience with share drives; “should we create folders for different document types?” Unlike some people in the SharePoint community, I don’t think that was a bad question, and I don’t think the answer is always no, but in this case it was. There are only a few types of documents in this library, so a choice column will be easy to maintain and being able to filter the entire library will be helpful.

The other bit of metadata that they want to associate with these documents is critical, but optional and problematic. When the documents are related to one of our insured facilities (a nuclear power plant), they want to identify the name of the facility and the operator / owner. The problem with this is that these facilities have a long life, and their owners, and to a lesser extent the facility names, change over time. This one was easy. We already have managed metadata columns established for both of these attributes. The aliases associated with the metadata terms include all the current ways people refer to these facilities: e.g. “Cook” “DC Cook” “Donald C Cook” etc. and we include both current and previous owners in the list of aliases.

On Monday, we are going to build this library with this group in the audience of a Lync meeting. I want them to see how easy it is to build. I hope that someday they will be able to build libraries like this for themselves, but I also want them to realize that building them isn’t a burden for us; it’s that whole “services” thing.

Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker

A few days ago, the AIIM New England chapter held its final event of the program year. The event title suggested three disparate topics: “Cloud, Mobile content management and BYOD”, but we quickly were made to understand that these topics are deeply intertwined. In addition, it became apparent that the panel we assembled for this discussion understood the ways in which the challenges these topics present are not new, not different and that this is not the last time we will see them.

Our panel included Roger Bottum – VP of Marketing, SpringCM; Christopher J Luise – Executive VP, ADNET Technologies and Marc D. Anderson – Co-Founder and President of Sympraxis Consulting. Regular readers of this blog know that Marc trades under the Twitter handle of @sympmarc and Chris’ business thoughts can be found under @ITwithValue although I prefer the bacon-laced tweets from @cluise. Roger’s insight can be tapped at @springCM, a recent add to my daily twitter feed. We chose this group with the thought that a vendor, an integrator and a consultant would be able to give three different views on the subject. I’m not sure if it was the combination, or the fact that these guys were not actual competitors (like some of our previous panels) or perhaps that we just got lucky and picked three brilliant speakers, but this was an awesome panel.

I scrawled notes and quotes across 10 pages while trying to juggle a comment and question feed from a streaming audience that was almost the size of the group gathered in the room. I can’t recap everything, but just the opening thoughts were enough to tell me this panel wasn’t going to stay on the rails:

Roger: “Mobile is not an option, it’s here. The cloud isn’t a question of ‘if’; it’s a question of ‘when’ and ‘how’”.

Chris: “Connecting to the enterprise has always been possible, it’s just been clunky. Now, scale has come to the market and most companies have been caught on their back foot.”

Marc: “This technology has always been around, just not everywhere – now it is” Marc also added my favorite quote of the event “By the way, the ‘D’ in BYOD stands for device, not disaster.”

These and a few other common threads dominated the technical current running through this meeting. The notion that we have been dealing with the problems of integrating new devices, securing new devices and adapting to new technologies forever, was prevalent throughout the discussion. The thing that made this discussion so fascinating was the absolute pragmatism that was evident in their collective point of view. When a question was asked about controlling a cloud-based solution or controlling a cadre of mobile devices, the answer was fast and sharp – “to assume that you have control today is a false assumption!” It’s not some brave new world that we are entering into; it’s the next phase of an evolutionary process that involves a broader audience.

One of the most spirited portions of the discussion came after a question from a member of our streaming audience, asking about the fact that people are now carrying a laptop, an iPad and a smartphone instead of a single device. The attendee wondered how corporate IT was going to make this a better experience. Ironically, I was sitting there with those three devices, and the question kicked off a series of responses that ranged from the suggestion that my laptop was inadequate to the fact that today’s solutions have to driven by a combination of Capability, Form Factor and User Experience. That seemed to be enough to light the fuse on the philosophical side of this meeting, which was a powerfully refreshing discussion. Again, I can offer a few quotes:

Roger: “If someone doesn’t think it (your solution) works better than the old solution, it’s not going to be supported.”

Marc: “IT is not spending enough time asking users what they want and what they need to do their job. IT is more concerned about writing a BYOD policy than they are about getting people the data they need.”

Chris added some thoughts that seem to indicate that the key vendors in this space are fueling the fire toward a trend that supports their own objectives.

“Apple wants to sell devices, Microsoft wants to sell applications that are going to work on all (wink) devices and Oracle (yes, he said Oracle) wants you to believe that only the data really matters.”

The event ended with a major challenge to companies and particularly those of us in IT:

Give your users the tools they need to meet the increasing demands you are placing on them.

I don’t know who offered the suggestion that problem facing practitioners is to find a way to meet technical, cultural, and procedural challenges in an integrated manner – and to meet those challenges quickly. Of course, the panel members quickly added that meeting those challenges isn’t really a new task.

Scanner Rant

I want to start this post by saying that most of the vendors we deal with provide quality products and services and are pretty good about maintaining a mutually beneficial relationship between us and them. That said, there are some things that are bothering me right now. I am going to pick on one subject, Desktop Scanners, and I am going to describe some of the things that drive me nuts. Later in this series, I’ll discuss how I think both vendors and customers could help avoid these problems (yes, I am going to throw stones at myself). For a variety of reasons, I am not going to mention specific vendors, venues or products.

My scanner battle began a few years ago with the purchase of about a dozen desktop scanners. We selected a brand that had a good mix of features, performance and software, and people generally loved having these units on their desk. In almost every case though, these scanners developed a serious double-feeding problem in a relatively short time frame. We contacted the vendor’s tech support, we contacted the company we bought these from, and neither was able to fix the problem. Parts were purchased, instructions were followed, double feeding continues to this day. Now, we are getting ready to replace these scanners.

I had an opportunity recently to meet with representatives of this vendor. Before looking at their current product line, I mentioned the problems we are having. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that our case was unique. The sales rep, claiming to be familiar with the tech-support logs, told me there is “no indication of widespread multiple feed issues” with the scanner model we own. He questioned whether or not I had followed the instructions properly, whether I had purchased OEM or after market replacement parts and whether or not I had properly pursued each service claim. He dismissed my affirmative responses and said “well, it’s probably time that you replace these scanners anyway” as several new models have been released since we purchased our scanners.

What happened next was simply bizarre. He directed me to a product demonstration area and proceeded to show me the current replacement for the scanner we own. He explained the new features in this model, including a feeder mechanism that has been redesigned to prevent double-feeding. Of course, I asked: “why would you bother to redesign the feed mechanism if double-feeding wasn’t a problem?” The answer, “we are constantly upgrading our scanners.” – You don’t say…

The next problem, involved purchasing a desktop scanner from a different manufacturer. We scoured the product descriptions and selected what appeared to be a great replacement. It listed all the same features, including an ability to scan directly to SharePoint. We bought one, only to find that many of the features were available only after the purchase of the professional version of the scanner software (at a cost almost equal to that of the scanner). Also, scanning to SharePoint failed on all but the smallest documents due to an ‘http put error’ even though we have previously changed that setting in SharePoint and we can upload the documents manually. Without hesitation, we returned this scanner. We have also had problems with workgroup scanners that were advertised as being able to scan to SharePoint. We found, during setup, that they needed much more robust permission levels than a human user would need to put documents into a SharePoint library.

Obviously, we made some mistakes in evaluating and purchasing these products. As mentioned above, I’ll talk about our “lessons learned” in a follow-up post. For now, I want to end with a short list of features that every desktop scanner should have:

1. Automatic removal of blank pages when scanning in duplex mode.
2. The ability to easily create a searchable PDF.
3. The ability to send PDFs created in step #2 to any location on SharePoint where the user has permission to contribute.
4. The ability to scan up to the rated capacity of the sheet-feeder without jamming.
5. The ability to detect variations in paper size and “just deal with it”.

Note: All of these features should be available when scanning in Black & White, Grayscale, and Color modes. And just so you know, my definitions of “automatic” and “easy” do not include programming a workflow or creating a complex processing job.

Customer Service Rules

Yesterday, as I was riding our exercise bike at 4:30 AM, I noticed an offer to download the new Twitter iPhone app. I’ve been a little disappointed with TweetDeck lately so I thought I’d give this a try. At first, I was impressed that Twitter’s link took me right to the App store and initiated the transaction to download the app. A few seconds later, my free transaction was derailed by a demand from Apple that I accept the “new Terms and Conditions”. I said “OK”, since that was the only way I could continue. Then, I arrived at Page 1 of a 35 page agreement. My first thought shouldn’t be published here, but my second thought was “what if I treated my users like this?” No, this isn’t fantasy day, I realize my little two farm SharePoint installation is several orders of magnitude smaller than the iPhone App Store. Still, they have users, I have users. Each of our groups of users represent past, present and hopefully future business, so I think some level of comparison is valid.

Ironically, later in the day, one of our policyholders called me with a question about the SharePoint site that we established for her company. She described what she considered to be a problem with a document library on her site. I promised to research the issue and get back to her. What I discovered was a situation that was not actually a problem, but I could see how it could appear to be a problem. I explained this to our user, and then began thinking about how we could add some information to all of these sites, so other users would not be similarly confused. Had I began our conversation with “before we start, I’m going to have to ask you to agree to our new Terms & Conditions”, I might be looking for a new job today.

Obviously, I would never consider throwing a 35-page collection of self-serving terms in front of this, or any other user. That Apple, Facebook and other companies do take this approach illustrates their arrogance, and it hints of an attitude that says we must want their product or service bad enough to let ourselves be treated shabbily. That they get away with this treatment is both sad and temporary; I have already stopped trying to expand my presence on Facebook. The App Store is the only option for iPhone apps but the iPhone, once a game changer, is no longer the only game in town. My customer service experience with these businesses do not make me feel good. That makes me think about why I choose to do business with these companies and it makes me consider what I am asking my own customers to accept.

We all know the movie line “if you build it, they will come” but I am reminded of what my boss said during my annual review “now that you have built it, you have to maintain it” – he was referring to our customer portal on SharePoint. We need to consider customer service when we create SharePoint sites. It doesn’t matter if the “customers” are our coworkers, our business partners or actual paying customers. As SharePoint becomes our lobby, our information desk, our project war room, and our archive; people have to feel comfortable using it. Part of the task of making people comfortable deals with layout and delivering the features that support business requirements. That’s the most important part, and I can honestly say, that’s the part I’m good at. The other part, the part I struggle with, is what to do when there is a problem.

Normally, I rely on one of my staff members to provide excellent customer service. In fact, when I gave a training presentation last year in Florida, two people in the audience seemed like members of his fan club. He is good, but SharePoint is up 24/7/365 and he isn’t. For those other hours, we are working to build a first class self-help site. We are in the early stages of design for this site, but I am encouraged by the energy surrounding this project. My staff and the consultant we are working are committed to creating an excellent user experience. We don’t want this to be the last resort in a frustrating search for answers; we want our Help Desk to be a welcoming environment that leads to a rich array of self-help resources. I think SharePoint is up to the task, I know we are. As we move through this project, I’ll share our results here.