ML Starkey's Weblog: Service with a smile!
Providing Technical Support to Sun's customers and other topics

Recently, I've been following an email thread circulating among my tech support colleagues. The subject is an LDAP issue that is turning out to be quite a bear. Most of the LDAP issues customer call in with can be very involved, but that's not the point here.

What struck me was something else.

It's typical when a colleague has a customer with a tough issue for them to send an email around via our internal list with a short description of the problem, the steps taken, the errors produced and so forth and ask for suggestions. Others on the list will send out what help they can and often take the time to describe a similar problem they encountered and how they fixed it. It's just one way we get answers and solve problems.

As I read through the responses to this LDAP question-du-jour, I suddenly realized how we take ownership of not just problem, but the people. All the "here's what fixed it . . ." responses usually include the phrase "my customer did (some action)" or "we found this patch helped" (we meaning the customer and the support engineer). Even in our face-to-face or phone discussions amongst ourselves, we tend to make the same references.

A cynical person would say it's simply a shorthand for "the customer I was working with" or "the customer who me called yesterday" and that's true. I contend that it is more than that. When you call in for help and reach me (or one of my colleagues), you become MY customer and the issue you have is OURS and WE will solve it together.