What does good service look like to you? Good service is centered around consistency, and it really starts with approaching the client from a place of empathy. Mhmm. The understanding that they are calling in because they're having a problem. They're having an issue with a printer or connecting to the wireless or something like that. And starting from there and getting to understand what their problem is and approaching it from a place of trying to help is really the best place to start. Welcome back to another episode of Unraveling IT: Expert Tech Talks. I'm Garrett Wiesenberg, VP of Solutions Consulting here at Corsica Technologies. And today, I'm joined by Tyler Cameron, the Senior Service Desk Manager here at Corsica. On our last episode, we met with Nate Troyer and learned a little bit about his backstory, how he started in service and ended up in sales. Now we're going to go straight to the front lines to the individual who has to support all of the things that Nate sells. Tyler and his teams interact with customers and clients, you know, day in, day out and service their needs. It's great to have you, Tyler. Thank you. So let's just kinda start with you as a as a person. How did you end up at Corsica, and, you know, how long have you been here? What's a little bit of your background? Sure. So I started out with a little bit of a background in computer science, making my way through various programming classes, you know, tinkering with PCs and things growing up, and inevitably finding myself here in the service desk working alongside other service desk people. I answering the phones. You've been at Corsica now for, what, seven Eight years now? Yeah. Eight. Eight years. And you started out in the service desk handling, you know, triaging calls and and dealing with, you know, client issues. Is was there a specific topic or technology that interested you more or that you focused on more than others? Oh, definitely the with the computer science background, the programming background, getting into the CLI of a network switch or an access point or a firewall is really what drove me in the service desk and really kind of sharpened my focus in that Gotcha. Specialty. So let's just start off with probably the the broadest question and also the most pertinent to the topic at hand. What does good service look like to you? Good service is centered around consistency. You know, you want the client to call in and know what to expect right off the bat. Right. No no second guessing or anything like that. And it really starts with approaching the client from a place of empathy. Mhmm. The understanding that they are calling in more than likely because they're having a problem. They're having an issue with a printer or connecting to the wireless or something like that. And starting from there and getting to understand what their problem is and approaching it from a place of trying to help is really the the best place to start. Yeah. That's I think, that's a really good point. You know, starting with empathy is probably the most important thing when understanding where the the clients are coming from, understanding their perspective. Because, you know, as technical individuals, we know that this issue in Word to us or Microsoft Excel or whatever it be maybe may not be a huge impact to to us. Right? Like, we can always figure it out. But to the the person on the other end of the phone, it could be mission critical to them. They could be completely down. So how does your team sort of balance fire drills versus, like, true critical items versus, you know, just day to day support? Well, we have a variety of different teams on the service desk. One centered around incidents that come through, other centered around requests that need to be taken care of, whether that be new user setups, PC deployments, application licensing, things like that. Mhmm. And so having those various departments allows us the flexibility of having specific teams dedicated to working on that Outlook issue that isn't going right. And then also being able to juggle the application installs, the licensing. How How do you interact with the other departments? Because to your point, we we do have multiple teams, not only within the service desk, but we also have different teams across the entire organization that are all focused on service delivery, you know, client success. How do you interact with those other teams? Or how do you ensure communication amongst the different departments? Sure. Well, communication is key. Yep. Constant touch points with the various department leads, making sure that they're regular cadence calls to know what's going on with any given client at any given time. Yep. Is very, very important to making sure that the long term success of the customer is first and foremost what we're trying to accomplish. For the individuals listening today, I mean, what are some tactical items that they could do to improve communication whether within their team or, you know, cross-functional across different departments? I would say starting with a regular cadence of calls. So, you know, we don't want a death by meeting scenario. But having a, you know, consistent touch point with whether that be your team members or cross department leads, whatever that looks like, that is the starting point is making sure that there is a monthly or weekly or even a daily 15-minute huddle Mhmm. To know what's going on at any given time. And do you have some of those set up yourself today with, you know, your different teams or departments? Oh, absolutely. With the service managers especially, that is a, you know, 8:30 AM, 15-minute call that happens. Who's out? What's on fire? Is there anything that came in overnight that we need to address first thing in the morning? On the account management side, you know, touch points for included projects monthly, you know, to make sure that we have the executed, shuffled around, reprioritized based on customer need. You can't over communicate. Right? More communication is better than no communication. If you feel like you've said it once, continue to say it until, you know, it sinks in and really be intentional with, you know, how you're approaching those calls and disciplined with ensuring that they stay on the calendar. Yeah. Because to your point, I mean, it can become death by meeting probably pretty quickly and monotonous, you know, day in and day out if you're having these meetings, but having, I think, probably a clear agenda. Right. If we don't know what's going on internally, how could we ever expect the customer to know Yeah. What's going on? Yeah. Can you maybe give us an example of when tight collaboration internally led to huge wins for a specific client? Yeah. Absolutely. Especially when it comes to, you know, managed services being just one piece of the overall puzzle. Mhmm. We have ProServe and account management that also play a huge factor in And what's ProServe? Project services. Okay. In the overall success of the customer. Mhmm. Now, Teams allows us to be very flexible when it comes to creating various group chats or channels to make sure that we can remain flexible in having groups of people dedicated to knocking out very specific tasks for the bigger picture. Yeah. As a result, you know, when everything finally comes together on the managed services side with collaboration on the project services side Yeah. We can pivot and adapt and really help each other out to make sure that at the end of the day, the client is coming out on the other end successfully. So you're saying you leveraged Microsoft Teams chat to kind of cross-functionally or, you know, cross-departmentally address needs or whatever could occur from a given project, essentially. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And I think everybody can relate to there being a lot of white noise. You know? Yep. There's a lot going on at once, emails coming through, chats coming through. Calls coming in. Yeah. Absolutely. And when we're able to segment specific groups of people, maybe include one project person and one service person in the account management representative in one chat, everybody's able to really, again, over-communicate Mhmm. With one another what's going on for that specific topic as it ties back to the project or greater initiative for the customer. Yeah. And that's not, to your point, just for projects. I mean, it's, you know, if a client's down for whatever reason, maybe, you know, storm came through and knocked down Internet or whatever could occur. You put together more or less a- we'll call it a tactical team that addresses, you know, the issues and outages. And so, really, it sounds like any organization could employ the same tactics or the same, you know, ideas within their own organization. Is that fair? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, when you think about various industries like health care, you know, for example, when you're coming in, it isn't just approaching the receptionist and then the receptionist tells somebody else and then they tell somebody else. There's a whole system behind that that's allowing everybody to communicate with one another at a moment's notice. Everybody knows what's going on all at once. Yeah. Now with that being said, we can't stop the greater service initiative. To make sure that the bigger picture stays intact while we focus on the incident itself is key. And so our clients that have internal IT teams, you know, what they could be doing is identifying key stakeholders in any given scenario. And that, that probably is gonna fall into their business continuity planning and, you know, the key stakeholders aligned with the different applications or different services for their organization is kind of what it sounds like. And so they need to ensure that they have good communication across departments because I think what we see the most, and you can probably attest to this a little more than I can, is that oftentimes engineers or IT people aren't the best communicators. They tend to just wanna focus on the technical and focus on the IT. And, you know, if there's an issue, they're typically trying to fix it, but they're not necessarily the best at broadcasting. Here's the issue. Here's what we're doing to fix it, you know, and and collaborating with the different departments. I mean, is that is that fair? Is that what you typically see? Yeah. More or less. And it when you mentioned key stakeholders, executive, or it could mean the Director of IT, or maybe it's just somebody boots on the ground that just works there. Mhmm. And as you approach these people and you communicate the issues or the project at hand that you're trying to accomplish, communicate the issues or the project at hand that you're trying to accomplish with them, that there isn't a breakdown in communication on the client side as well. You wanna make sure that the customer is aware of what's going on and that that is gonna be trickled down through the organization. Right? So if you tell a C-level executive, hey. This is our plan. This is what we're doing. This is where we're at with it. We need to also be able to ensure that within that organization, that information is going to get passed on to the director of IT, to the people who are actually being impacted by the issue. Yeah. So what happens when delivery and experience aren't aligned? Well, I think that that again comes back to communication. Right? And it, it's- it's no surprise that sometimes a request would be submitted or somebody calls in saying that something is wrong. And we think one thing, but in reality, it is something else. And so, really, you need to get in there and start asking questions. Mhmm. When did this start happening? How many people is this impacting? Yep. Really get to the what and the why of it Yeah. And not just the what the problem is. Because a lot of times when you're given the problem, it is very easy to become sidetracked or tunnel vision with what you think it might be based on your biases or previous experience. So on the same topic of delivery and experience, how does your team handle feedback? Or how do you take feedback and, you know, action it into tangible tactical items that you can actually, you know, accomplish or improve? Sure. Well, every ticket is a learning experience. Every- every issue, request, problem, project that comes through should be a learning experience. We don't want to stifle learning opportunities with the people that that are actively engaging with the particular topic. Yeah. But at the same time, we need to make sure that that is getting into the right hands being addressed in a way that sets everybody up for success in the future. Mhmm. Right? So documentation is key. Making sure that we're outlining what the issue was, what steps we took to resolve it. Mhmm. And then at the end of the day, coming up with a summary so that in the future, if that were to happen again, we're able to more quickly recognize the symptoms, triage the issue, and ultimately get the customer back up and running as quickly as possible. Kind of bringing it back more to, you know, our bread and butter, which is as a managed service provider, you know, what's one thing you wish clients understood about what happens behind the scenes? Yeah. So that's- that's a really great question. I think oftentimes what people tend to forget is, well, we're receiving calls where customers are frustrated. They're not able to work. Maybe a, a request has taken a little bit longer than normal. We're... we're people too. When we email a client, when we approach an issue or request that they have come through, we're looking at it through the lens of empathy. Right? And and doing our best to be helpful. And oftentimes, when there is an outage or even something as small as maybe a printer not printing the right color, you know, that can lead to a lot of frustrating emotions coming through. And sometimes on the phone, when we're doing our best to help, it's very easy to carry away in those emotions and allow that to come through in a way that really makes our technicians or our project engineering team, it makes it difficult for them to push through that. When when we're looking at it from a lens of empathy, we hope that in return, the client can recognize that Yeah. At the end of the day, we wanna help them. And being very vocal about the issue on the phone doesn't necessarily make it any easier to to troubleshoot. How can you tell if how can any business tell if their service delivery teams and their client success teams are aligned or their client facing teams are aligned? Every organization has various KPIs that they look to execute on. Right? Mhmm. And the KPIs or key performance indicators for managed services may not be exactly the same as what we're expecting out of the account- account management team or the project services team for that matter. So, really, when you start to focus in on what those KPIs are across the various teams, you can see that maybe increased ticket count or high call volume starts to impact customer satisfaction scores. Mhmm. Maybe the number of projects that are being sold by the account management team is starting to dip a little bit as a result of those low client satisfaction scores on the managed services side. So you can start to see these trends that develop across teams based on the performance of one. So you're saying you identify the symptoms and then put together the symptoms to try and identify the root cause, essentially. Right. So if we take managed services as the starting point, and we have a particular customer who submitted multiple issues in a week, issues in a week. And we start to fall behind on those issues as they come in. That is in itself going to translate into hurdles that are gonna need to be conquered from the account management team. They get underwater. They get behind. They can't focus on the things that help move the organization forward as a whole, whether that be executing on projects or looking at a road map, other service incidents, and maybe identifying those trends that have come through over the last month or two. Yeah. So when managed services starts to fall behind, you can see how very easily that will bleed into- Other departments. Other departments Yep. In the company. Gotcha. And so, really, it's identifying, you know, the teams that may be so underwater or maybe focused on items that they shouldn't necessarily be focused on day in and day out because they're dealing with the symptoms. Right? If they're not addressing things quickly or in the proper timeline, it's gonna create customer service problems, which is going to bog down, you know, other individuals of the customer service team from maybe where they should be focused. Right. And may maybe those issues can manifest in in different ways and present themselves maybe in ways that are more obvious and some that are not. So, customer satisfaction score that comes through indicating that there was a problem, and it maybe is really focused on the one particular incident or request that came through Yep. But maybe indicative of a larger issue Yep. Within either the managed services team or the, project services team. Yeah. And to maybe put it into perspective for, you know, different industries, like a manufacturing facility, for instance, if quality assurance isn't doing their job, parts could be shipped out that, you know, are defective. And then all of a sudden, the customer service department is going to be dealing with a high volume of returns and, you know, RMA requests in general. And very quickly that things start to break down. Yeah. Things begin to break down. And, like, even from a hospital perspective, you know, nurses who are administering treatment, something goes wrong there, you know, maybe they administer the wrong treatment, you know, maybe they administer something that's not covered by insurance. Well, all of a sudden, you know, the back-office hospital staff or the office type staff are gonna be dealing with a lot of, you know, claims and calls and, you know, frustrations from clients who are being billed for things that just weren't covered by insurance. So, you know, I think to your point, there's, there's areas across any organization where you can pretty easily identify high volume requests or issues and then trace it back to the root cause. Right. I and I think it's important to recognize that it doesn't always have to be so grand in scope. It could be something as simple as a customer waiting on hold for an extended period of time. I think we've all experienced the long wait times in a doctor's office. Right? You show up for your appointment and suddenly 45 minutes later, you still haven't been seen. To the customer, that is just, oh, okay. I've been waiting here for 45 minutes. What's going on? But really what's happened behind the scenes could snowball and cause, you know, this department to impact the next, to impact the next, and suddenly Yeah. And it can even honestly be within one team as well probably because, you know, to your example of the doctor's office there, you know, if one patient was late to their appointment Right. You know, that's gonna have a spiraling effect, you know, downward in in terms of negative client experience. They're all just gonna be late at that point. Yeah. Yeah. And it can be challenging to pull out of a spiral like that. Yeah. For sure. Well, I appreciate you being here today, Tyler. I think I have one final question for you. What's one principle that helps you lead with both execution and empathy? Everybody shows up to work to do their best. Nobody's coming in to haphazardly, you know, execute on any item, whether that be on the account management side or the customer service side. Right? So really looking at it through the lens of you have a team, and they are trying to do what they can to do right by the customer, execute on issues and requests that come through, and at the end of the day, leave the client in a better place than they were before. It- it's really important that you recognize everybody has things going on in their personal life that sometimes can bleed through into the workplace. Yeah. And learning to recognize that, take breaks, you know, a quick breakout or a one-on-one with your people is really important that you keep a pulse on what's going on with them both personally and professionally to make sure that they can continue to do right by the customer. Yeah. That's really insightful. And, you know, again, I really appreciate you coming today, talking through these things with us, and hope you have a great weekend and rest of your day. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.
