When I first started working in IT, I pulled some major bonehead mistakes. I was a master at ticking off my customers. My first IT boss was extremely patient with me and very merciful in many ways. More than once I found myself being reminded that someone I was interacting with was my customer, and that my behavior was not appropriate for that relationship. It took a long time to sink in.

For those of you who suffer from the same disease, you’d probably benefit from listening to the Manager Tools podcast that began all of their podcasts: The Solution to a Stalled Technical Career.

Have you read the news lately? Banks are failing, unemployment is rising, and companies are laying people off. Our economy looks like it is going to slow down significantly for a few months - perhaps a couple of years - and directors are going to be looking around for people to lay off. Who gets laid off? It’s not the people lacking technical ability. It’s the people who are perceived to be jerks. Directors lay off the people that they do not like. They do not like people who do not treat them or their clientele as customers.

Here are some basic concepts for you to start using NOW before it is too late. Think of these as the Four Commandments of IT Customer Service.

1. You are at the bottom of the food chain.

IT costs the company money. Unless you are working in a group that produces software that your company sells to other companies, you are working in what is known as a cost center. A cost center does not bring in revenue. A cost center costs money to operate and is a burden on the organization. Cost centers are tolerated because their products are thought to make the rest of the organization more efficient and effective, thereby allowing other groups to bring in revenue or save money in excess of the cost of the IT work to help things along.

People who work in cost centers are generally at the bottom of the corporate ladder. Pay attention, because this is important. No matter your title, pay grade, or status within the IT organization, when you are talking to someone from the business side or a client group, even if it is a contractor or a customer service representative, you are the servant and they are your customer.

And you need to act like it. So many IT people make the stupid mistake of talking down to people that they believe they outrank after they get promoted! Yes, your new shiny Senior Project Manager title looks nice, and yes you make twice as much as someone who works in a store using your software, but never forget that you work for them, and that person earns your company the money that pays your paycheck.

Say things like this, “Hey, you are in charge. I’m going to make my recommendations, and I will tell you how much it will cost and how long it will take, but you decide what you want to have happen. You are the boss.” Say that to your customers, and say it frequently. If they sound nervous about approaching you, they probably are. You are that jerk in IT that no one wants to deal with because all you do is say, “You can’t do that!” or “What a stupid idea!” or “We don’t have enough people for that!”

No one cares about your opinion of the product. If you knew anything about products, you would be in marketing. No one cares about your lack of people. If you are short on people, then as a manager, you need to plan better and ensure that your department is funded to meet demand by making effective presentations to management or asking your business customers to send funding over to you for you to hire more people to support them. You are the servant. If they say, “Bring me some tea,” you ask how hot they want it and what kind of tea.

You are also at the bottom of the IT food chain if other IT groups come to you with requests to which you must respond. Those groups are your customers. If you make the tools they use, then they are the customer. If you provide the data they use, they are the customer.

When you tell your customer that you are their equal, and that you need to partner up or work together as a team, your customer is thinking, “Not so much.” Customers do not partner with you. They are in charge, and you are not. Do not use such language toward customers.

2. You are not saving money when you dump work into other teams.

You might think you are a genius who came up with this cool idea of allowing your customers to do self-service, a popular idea right now among IT groups and customer service groups, but what everyone perceives you to be doing is weaseling out of work. When you create a web site where people can enter their own tickets instead of you entering tickets for them, they get angry because you are reducing the service level you are providing.

Think about how you feel calling a big company and having the phone answered by a computer. “Please listen carefully because our menu options have changed.” Everyone knows what this system is doing. It is trying to keep them from having to talk to you. The system tells you, the customer, the company you are calling does not like or appreciate you. They think your call is silly, and that your questions can be handled by a robot instead and you won’t care.

Did the company call you to ask you if you mind calling the machine and talking to it? I doubt it. Did the machine immediately offer the option of talking to a person, or did it spew out a speech and make you listen to every other option first? How does that make you feel? Appreciated? Served? Loved? Wanted?

Certainly not.

If you are going to do this kind of thing, there is a way to go about it. You have to first ask your customer if they want self-service. If they say they do, then you have to have them sign-off on a timeline for you to provide them with a demo of the self-service experience, user acceptance testing during which you will allow them to have you change the way things work, and training that you provide or arrange for at your expense for their trainers, managers, and even all of their people at your expense. Then, you have to do all of this in a patient, carefully planned way, on-time, and on-budget, all the while remember Rule #1: YOU ARE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE FOOD CHAIN. You are basically begging them to take on self-service and you are begging them for approval.

Any other attitude you take? Career suicide.

Otherwise, keep the work inside your team and do your management thing creating a budget of expenses, a presentation to management of increased supply and headcount needed to support it, and ask outside groups that depend on you for funding (politely).

3. Don’t expect congratulations from your customers.

I’ve never met a group that actually liked their billing application. I’ve heard a user of an IT application say, “This is awesome and perfect! Don’t change a thing!”

If you like getting congratulations on a job well done, then you’ve made a stupid decision getting anywhere near the information technology industry. No one likes IT. IT costs too much money. IT is too slow. IT builds things we don’t want and charges us for them. IT doesn’t build what we asked for. IT is stubborn and acts dominant forcing us to yell at them to knock them down a peg or call their bosses to remind them that they are just some little ants that we, the business, can squash like bugs.

Your customers are not going to congratulate you. They are going to complain. The master IT manager asks, “How are things?” knowing that the answer will be a litany of complaints. He is ready with pen and paper to write down those complaints. He is not waiting for an “atta boy” and a pat on the head. He writes down the complaints. He reads them back. He fishes for more complaints. He tickets the complaints. He tracks the tickets, and he gives status back regularly on where the tickets are at in being fixed and tells them how many days they have to wait for fixes.

Unfortunately, too many IT managers hear complaints and offer up excuses. Even worse, and yet more frequent, is the IT Manager who argues with the customer to tell them that their complaint is incorrect and that the problem is that they do not understand the genius and sheer majesty of the IT application.

Such IT people are the first to go in a layoff.

4. Your boss is your customer.

Every American worker needs this branded on them somewhere: I work for you. I have no idea when or how we lost the idea that the boss is a customer, but we have. Maybe unions are the cause. Perhaps it is the politically correct 1990’s where all employees were supposed to be “empowered” that caused it.

Workers have forgotten completely that the boss is your first customer.

Important points:

• You were hired to help your boss
• You were not hired to do things right
• You were not hired to do things your way or the best way
• You were not hired to make decisions that are not aligned with your boss’s objectives
• You were not hired to advise your boss as if you are some super-genius consultant

You were hired to help your boss. That means that every time you complain to your boss that your boss is not helping you enough, not giving you enough training, not making the right decision, or not supporting you, YOU ARE WRONG.

Your boss pays for you to be there. If your boss wants you to play fall guy and say “no” so that they can come in like a hero and say “yes”, then do it. If your boss wants you to deploy software you don’t think has been tested enough, alert them to your concerns calmly, and when they say, “DO IT!” then for the love of all that is holy you do it with a smile on your face.

Your boss is your customer. Have you forgotten that your boss pays you? That makes them the customer. Your boss should never, ever be doing anything that you should have done. Your boss is not there to help you. Your boss is there to serve his boss. You are there to serve him. The service goes up, not down.

When your boss calls, you should be answering your phone, “How can I help you?” Why would you give better service to someone at a drive-through window at a fast food restaurant who will only pay you $5.00 for french fries than you would someone who pays you six figures to manage work for them?

Want to avoid getting laid off during this recession? Realize you are at the bottom of the food chain. Stop dumping work into other teams. Be aware of coming criticism and receive it with a smile. Remember that your boss is your customer and treat them better than anyone else.

There are IT managers who are masters of these four principles. They are in direct competition with you for your job. With rising unemployment, you need to keep your job. You do not want to be ousted right when things start going sour for companies all across the world. That’s exactly when you want to buckle in and stay fixed for a long haul. The road ahead is going to be rough. Act like it and survive. Go into denial, and you’re toast.