While standing in line to get my morning breakfast taco & coffee fix I realized they had finally started to recover from losing “Fast Fingers”, the always disheveled looking counter guy. I don’t know what happened to him or where he went. But I know that for the first week the wait time to order and pay took 4x what it did before his departure. The guy moved around that register faster than anyone I’ve ever seen and hustled to help out the kitchen guys. And he was always chatting up customers. Despite his flaws he was pretty good at building a rapport with folks. The place seems void of any personality these days, which means all a customer cares about is the speed of the transaction. Screw that up and the only barrier to switching is a couple of bad tacos.

I don’t think service or tech support teams face challenges that are any different than that. You need to be mindful of both the transactional component of what your organization delivers as well as the relationship aspect of what you deliver. Make it easy for customers to get to you, deliver good service consistently and accurately, and in parallel make sure the teams are taking the time to get to know customers and learn what they’re about. If you don’t customers won’t volunteer to you that they may be unhappy or underwhelmed because there’s no compelling reason to. They’ll also be more likely to minimize inevitable blips in performance as you scale the business if you’re making an effort to personalize the interaction. In fact if you do it right you can snag some really terrific ideas from customers on how to do things better. But you have to ask them and trust their judgment.

Equally important in the tech space is the internal effort. Learn what makes a Sales guy tick, or what Product Managers are working on this quarter or next. You can’t continue to live in a vacuum and hope that everyone appreciates what I call the “Silent Excellence of Service”. Show a genuine willingness to build relationships across the organization and you’ll likely discover that it’s reciprocated.