According to this Legal Technology article, it could be.

Sometimes the cutting remark can blunt the cutting edge. Every year firms spend millions of dollars on hardware and software, but when we asked third-, fourth- and fifth-year associates about their firm’s technology as part of our annual midlevel job satisfaction survey (August 2008), we heard a lot more about long waits and condescending IT staffers than we did about innovative products. Specifically, we found, the quality of tech support — the size and organization of the help desk, and the responsiveness and attitude of its employees — often was the make-or-break factor in respondents’ opinion of their firm’s IT efforts.

I saw this first hand a number of years ago. Not specifically with a help desk, but I saw how a crummy attitude, and an unhelpful support person can ruin a tech project. I came in to an organization that had a fairly complex, yet very useful database system. Unfortunately, hardly anyone ever used it for anything outside of it’s main membership function. It had meeting planning, and subscription modules, and no one used them. When I suggested using them to some folks, I was met with fierce resistance, and came to the realization that everyone in this small organization simply hated this database, and I couldn’t really figure out why. I made an effort to educate people on the benefits, help them learn how it worked, etc. and nothing helped. Everyone still hated it.

It was only a couple of years into this job that I learned the reason why. Apparently, when they purchased this software, the software company sent a trainer to work with all of the staff. This person was not especially helpful to new users, had no patience for questions, did not do a good job training, and just generally wasn’t very nice. Everyone hated her, ergo, everyone hated the product.

I’ve continued to see the same thing play out over and over again. If your tech support folks convey a bad attitude when it comes to questions about your IT efforts, it will influence how people view the projects thesmelves.

Have you seen this play out in your own workplaces? Share your stories!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 7:47 pm and is filed under IT, Mike McBride. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.