I think everyone’s familiar with the IT helpdesk stereotype, typified by parodies like SNL’s Nick Burns, the BOFH, and so on. The stereotype is that support has little patience for users, thinks they’re all morons, and so on.
I was thinking about this recently, as all to often I do see the tendency in myself and other support professionals to edge toward this stereotype. It bugs me, because I hate that stereotype, so I was wondering why this seems to happen.
I’ve finally come down to a combination of theories. Mainly, I think it’s because as support, you are not exposed to all the users all the time. You only hear from them when there is a problem. Furthermore, there certainly is a technology aptitude curve among users, and support will probably get their proverbial 80% of issues from the users at the bottom 20% of that curve. That’s actually ok; that’s why we have support staff.
But what you wind up with, after several years, is a staff which is primarily only exposed to users with problems, many of which can be easily solved and many of which are Their Own Darn Fault. I think unless you (as support) make a conscious decision to remember that the facet of the users that you see is not the whole picture, the default conclusion would be to assume you are supporting a group of technologically incompetent whiners.
And many times, unfortunately, I think that’s what happens. So far the only remedy I’ve found for avoiding “IT Guy”(or gal, sorry — more stereotypes)-syndrome is:
- » Remember that the small sliver of time you interact with your users is not the sum total of who they are and what they’re about.
- » Find some way to proactively interact with your users in ways other than fixing issues. Walk around the office and talk to people. Go to happy hour after work. Something.
Because there’d be nothing more miserable than actually becoming the “Nick Burns” stereotype, and actually believing that your users are a bunch of idiots. Mainly because it’s not true.
I’m going to be doing at talk at the upcoming LugRadio Live about this kind of issue, although focused more on how we provide support within the Linux/Open Source community, and, more importantly, how we need to change our support mechanisms if we’re serious about wanting a majority market share in the OS market.
Sounds like a very cool topic; open source tech support has the additional challenge of being more or less voluntary, rather than paid positions.
In some ways it would seem that the passion which drives individuals to contribute for free would help to keep support civil and kind, but in practice I expect you have some of the same problems… since the only time you interact with your users is when they are complaining, and possibly are causing their own problems by Not Having Read the [Free] Manual, it would still be quite easy to gradually get a skewed perspective of your users.