This is a true story. The company name
has been changed.
Setting up telecommuting
The manager of the research department
at Acme Corporation approached management with a request to provide
telecommuting capability for research employees. The research staff would need
remote access to email, external journal articles, and internal document
systems.
Acme executives thought the
telecommuting capability would allow improved staff retention and flexibility,
while also reducing office rent costs. A pilot project was approved, and an
employee chosen to be involved in the pilot.
Set up and immediate failure
Acme set up a home office with company
equipment for the employee. Because the employee lived in a rural area where
there was no high-speed Internet access, a dial-up service was arranged.
Right away, the employee complained of
intermittent service problems; email was failing, and the screen was freezing
while he was trying to use internal documents or external journal articles.
The IT help desk suggested that the
employee call the Internet service provider about the service problem. The
Internet service provider said they had not been experiencing problems in the
employee’s area and that the problem must be with the employee’s system or
phone line.
The employee continued to call the help
desk whenever the problem occurred, which became more frequent, usually more
than once a day. Over the next three months, the problem continued and the IT
department tried several different ways to identify the problem.
·
A technician was sent to the employee’s
home to replace the modem and verify the configuration settings on the
employee’s system. The problem was not resolved.
·
The Acme email and document systems
were monitored for problems, but none were found that would cause the
employee’s problems.
·
The telephone company tested the
employee’s phone line, and verified that the line was fine.
·
A technician was sent to the employee’s
home to replace the computer.
Escalation
The research manager complained to
management that this pilot was a disaster and that IT wasn’t able to figure out
the problem. Several VPs noted that it seemed impossible for the project to
have gone so badly.
The IT manager was instructed to make
the remote employee’s problem a priority and get it resolved. After reviewing
the support desk records, the manager met with one of the support technicians. It
was a mystery. The technician was instructed to report to the employee’s home
to observe, and to spend every hour of every workday at the employee’s home
until the trouble was definitively identified.
Duh user
The technician returned to the office
after only a few hours, and could hardly wait to share her findings with the IT
manager. The technician and IT manager laughed all the way to the management
meeting to explain the problem – the employee had been using the telephone to
place outgoing phone calls while the phone line was already engaged for
Internet service. Because his phone was often in use for Internet service, his
friends, family, and co-workers found the employee hard to reach. As a result,
the employee started to make more frequent outgoing calls. He had not realized
that the reason he had to click the phone button to get a dial tone was because
his computer had the phone line in use for Internet access to email or the
remote database.
A second phone line was quickly
installed for the employee, the problem did not recur, and the rollout of
telecommuting was expanded successfully to other employees.
Conclusion
The IT manager and technician thought
the user was extremely stupid and found the whole situation hysterically funny.
Unfortunately, the IT manager did not realize he had a serious customer service
problem.
Some things were missed in setting up
the pilot project for the telecommuting employee. First, although the IT department
asked the office services department to make arrangements for the employee to
have a second phone line, they didn’t follow up to make sure the line had been
installed. This was a critical component of the plan.
Second, when setting up the employee’s
home office, assumptions were made about the employee’s technical savvy. No
assessment was made of the employee’s capabilities, and no training was
provided.
When the employee’s problems started to
occur, it took much too long for the IT department to really get serious about
solving the employee’s problem. He had service problems more frequently than
daily, and yet it took three months and the attention of several VPs to
motivate the IT department to go on site and determine the employee’s problem
first hand.
An observation – sometimes the only way
to assess a problem is to be on site and watch. The issue can occasionally be
beyond imagination.
Copyright
2015 Debbie Gallagher
