Tech Talk is Not Customer Service Friendly.
I will be totally honest. Sometimes I look at other blogs to come up with blog ideas for Nwaj Tech. It’s not that uncommon. A lot of bloggers recommend this when they need ideas.
When doing this research, I look at blog topics and if catches my interest or I think it’s something my clients/potential clients might find useful I will read it.
What I have noticed with many of the IT-focused blogs is something that has bothered me for a long time now. The use of tech talk or tech jargon to make their point.
People in technology fields will tech talk you to death, even on their blogs.
There is a stigma attached to those in information technology. That stigma is that we talk down to people and use technical jargon when we do this.
Your IT business cannot claim to be customer service centric and use tech talk in the same breath. ~Scott Gombar
Why Tech Talk Hurts Customer Relationships
Imagine going to the doctor for what you believe to be a minor problem. You get occasional headaches but you’re not sure what is causing them. After spending a few minutes talking to you and checking the basics the doctor tells you that you suffer from Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia.
Holy Batman, what is that you ask? He continues to inundate you with medical terminology that is way above your head. Then he sends you home with no further explanation or even a prescription.
First, let me define Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia. It’s more commonly referred to as brain freeze. This happens if you eat or drink something very cold fast.
Now if you left the doctor’s office without an explanation you would probably never return to that doctor again, right?
This happens in a lot of industries. Plumbing, legal, auto repair just to name a few.
It happens in information technology too, a lot.
What’s the Solution to Tech Jargon?
At a previous job, I was responsible for training technical support reps to assist customers, mostly non-technical, with technical problems.
The technical support department had a reputation for talking down to customers and even other non-technical employees.
We decided to rework all the training and related materials to exclude tech jargon and instead used layman’s terms wherever possible. We also trained employees that if they were to use tech jargon they had to define or explain it.
After approximately 6 months of utilizing this method of training survey scores and overall perception of the technical support team was improved drastically.
A few years later I was put in charge of a project to train non-technical employees on CompTIA’s A+ and Network+ material. The program had a great success rate. Almost every employee who went through the training continued to the technical support department.
The solution is simple. Train your technical client-facing employees how to talk to your customers the way you would want your doctor, lawyer or plumber to talk to you.
At Nwaj Tech we don’t assume that our client understands technical jargon and we will never tech talk you to sleep. We value our relationships with our clients and we understand that the technology world can be unnecessarily complicated.
On our blog posts, we do our best to explain everything in a way that any business owner can understand. We also do our best to explain the benefits for your business, not what is a shiny new toy for us.
Business owners and operators want to know how a service or product is going to improve their bottom line, employee production or improve the security of their network, servers, and workstations.
We get it. That’s what we strive to deliver to our clients.
We won’t tech talk you to death.
