The trusted advisor

In my day job, I work in an internal services provider scenario, providing account + relationship management services to senior IT management in a range of countries. Managing service escalations is one part of managing business relationships in IT.

Over the last week, the specific escalation I had was an interesting one.  It related to a problem one of my countries was having was with their end-users when using the global VPN service from client or home locations.  When connected, applications were hanging. Our incident management and technical teams worked through the entire stack of infrastructure on the data centre hosting side. From networks to VPN gateways and to centrally hosted business apps - zippo problems or issues. This was not surprising, because all the other countries who use the service were not having any issues whatsoever. And there were a lot of other countries.

Due to the board level attention on the issue with the customer, the IT Director in the country piled the pressure on me to ensure the technical teams looked more extensively and engaged vendor support on the VPN solution.  At first, I was resistant because I saw it as a local issue the country needed to fix (based on the analysis at that point in time). One of my companies corporate values is putting yourself in the other persons shoes. It then occurred to me the enormous pressure the IT Director was facing and how he needed his board to understand that his country team were working intensively with my team to resolve this, and everything necessary was being done to tackle this effectively. It reminded me that in being a relationship manager, that at times, I take an independent view of what my service organization is doing or not doing. I have a responsibility to challenge and organise assistance to ultimately help my customer, regardless of what the initial facts suggest of whose problem that might be.  In that moment, being a trusted advisor.

To date, the escalation is still ongoing and lots of technical investigation has been collaboratively achieved by ruling out lots of unlikely causes. Most importantly, everyone involved has been fully engaged and fascinated in understanding the root causes and resolving the problem. My mental shift from representing the service organisation as the relationship manager only to being a trusted advisor of the customer and collaborator with the technical teams, enhanced my relationships across the board.

Lesson learned? Check your mentality on how you can help your customers, even when conventionally, it suggests that there's nothing you can do. Being a collaborator and trusted advisor for a customer adds value and develops deeper relationships.