My best IT experience lately was with someone from another company
January 26th, 2008 Posted in Grade AAll employees should be willing to interact in a positive manner with clients and stakeholders regardless of their position in the organization.
Grade: A
Company:
EEI Communications
Event:
Helping solve some access problems for our Web site
Location:
Silver Spring, MD
Several months about I visited EEI Communications in Silver Spring, Maryland for some training in Dreamweaver CS3 and had some mixed feelings about the experience and the trainer. While at the training facility, I tried to pull up our Web site so that I could show our instructor some concrete examples of the problems that we were trying to solve. Unfortunately, over the course of two days I was never able to get our site to load. I was able to load all of the other USDA sites except ours. This was very troubling as it seemed impossible that I just happened to stumble across the one location in the country that had this problem. If it was happening to me, it was sure to be happening elsewhere.
At the time, I contacted our internal IT staff about the issue but really did not have the opportunity to speak with them in depth . I did bring it up with them again when I returned to the office and they promised to look into it. Several months passed and I never heard back from out IT staff, so I sent EEI an email directly, explained the issue and asked if they could try to bring up the site. Not too long afterward I was contacted by the head of IT for EEI and was told that they were still unable to access our Web site. Fortunately, he was extremely sympathetic and was willing to work with our IT staff to help resolve the issue (it seems we were blocking access to our site from a range of IP address that they were a part of).
The moral of the story is that in all likelihood, the head of IT at EEI that I spoke to probably has very little contact with the public and probably no one in the organization thinks of him as an ambassador for their company. The truth his, although I had only a luke-warm experience with EEI during my recent training, the experience with their IT staff was so overwhelmingly positive that I would consider giving them a second chance for my future training needs.
