[upbeat electronic music]
>>THWACKcamp!
>>Today, we're gonna talk about soft skills.
And I know what you're thinking.
Soft skills, really?
I'm already good at my job.
Why do I need to talk about this?
Well, let's talk about what soft skills are.
I hate the term soft skills, and I'll tell you why.
Because soft implies easy,
and they're not easy for everyone.
They don't come naturally.
A lot of people have to work on them.
But I do want to talk about them as essential,
because they are definitely important
for progressing your career.
Now, what do I mean by soft skills?
I mean people skills and the relational terms there.
We're talking about people skills.
How do you interact with people?
Either customers, colleagues, you know, whoever.
Who are you interacting with?
How can you interact better?
And who am I?
Why should you care what I think about this?
Well, I'm Head Geek Chrystal Taylor,
and before IT, I worked in a lot of different fields.
I worked in customer service,
I worked in collections, that was interesting,
I worked in retail, and I worked in food service industry.
All of which taught me many things about soft skills
that were important, which I've used to progress my career.
Now, the first skill we're gonna talk about
is customer service, and you might think that this
encompasses a lot of skills, and that is true,
but I had to stick to five soft skills
for this presentation, so I'm gonna talk about
customer service as if it was only one skill.
What does it mean, really?
Well, let's think about this.
Sometimes our customers are only internal.
Like, you're working internal IT, and all of your customers
are the people that work with you at the same company.
So maybe you don't care so much about what they think
about you, you just want to get your job done,
clock out at the end of the day, and go home.
And that may be true, but it's important to know
that it can make all the difference for people's feedback
of you to say, hey, you know what?
I'm having this problem.
Do you have a guy in IT you want to talk to?
And they can be like, hey, that guy,
that guy Brian over there, he's the one who helped me out.
He's really nice, he fixed my problem for me lickety-split,
we move on, and that word of mouth is gonna travel around.
People are gonna hear it, they're gonna know it,
they're gonna hear you and then say, hey,
that's the guy that's nice in IT.
And you know what?
You want to be the guy that's nice in IT,
'cause that's gonna help you progress your career.
You ever want to become a manager or a team lead,
or if you want to switch departments, big deal.
Customer service is a big deal.
Now, what else can be useful inside customer service?
Being polite is super helpful.
You want to make sure you stay calm and stick to the facts.
And think about this, too.
It's not personal.
Don't make it personal, don't let them make it personal.
Just stay calm and stick to the facts
and it will diffuse just about any situation.
In IT a few years ago, I was a team lead for a different
company and we did work on customer environments,
and one of my engineers made a mistake
and it cost the customer big time.
And unfortunately for that engineer,
they didn't have very good soft skills,
so I was called in to help out and to talk to the customer
and diffuse the situation because, understandably,
they were very upset.
You know, we got on a call with about 17, 18 other people,
and this guy tore into me,
even though I had no previous experience with this issue,
I had just been called in.
And even though I was not the one at fault
and all of those things, it's one of those situations
where he was an upper-level manager,
so he had heard of what happened from somebody
who had heard of what happened from somebody
who had heard of what happened.
And so, you know, some of the information
gets lost in there.
So what happened was, as he attacked me personally,
I just very calmly waited for him to take a breath,
and then I addressed his concerns, and I stuck to the facts
and told him what the issue actually was,
I told him where the issue stemmed from,
and how we were going to fix it.
And he didn't talk for the rest of the call,
it just defused the whole situation.
And then all of the engineers that were on both sides
of that call had the conversation about,
how do we progress this, how we're gonna fix it method.
The next skill I want to talk about is communication.
And I referenced this a little bit,
but I want to get a little bit more into it.
So communication is key,
and I am always working on my communication skills,
especially since I took this job, it's a wonderful job.
I have a hard time with certain communication skills,
and I know this to be true.
So I try to work on them.
You can do things like take classes on business writing
so you can write better emails,
you can take classes on giving presentations.
All of those kinds of materials are out there for you.
There's lots of YouTube videos to give tips and tricks
and those things, and I think they're a worthwhile endeavor.
It doesn't take that much time, but it can make all
the difference to the end user who's receiving that email,
or that phone call, or that presentation.
It can make all the difference to be better at communication
and making the difference to your customers,
being better at communication.
They want regular updates.
Set a cadence.
It doesn't have to be an update every time.
Maybe the update is,
we haven't made progress, and here's why.
Or maybe the update is, we don't know what the problem is,
but we've tried X, Y, and Z.
Whatever it is,
they want to know that something is being done.
They want to know you're working on it.
They don't want you to send,
they don't want to send you an email and then for you
to not respond for eight hours or two days or whatever.
Respond immediately, even if the answer is,
I'm really busy right now, I'll get back to you in an hour,
or two hours, or tomorrow, or whatever.
Even if the answer is, I can't get to it right now,
they want that communication.
It's very important to give that communication.
And to think about it like this, when you call
customer service because you're having a problem with,
let's say your phone, your phone is having problems,
you need a replacement, so you have to call customer service
so that you can get that lined up and get the hardware ready
so that they can send you a replacement
and you can send in your broken one,
or whatever it happens to be.
You don't want to be given a runaround,
you don't want to sit there and wait and wait and wait
and wait because oh wait, we didn't get an update,
we never got the email that said it's been shipped,
or we never got the update from the shipping company.
I mean, how many people don't check their tracking numbers
when they get them for packages?
Everyone checks that if it's from far away.
So, you know, just think about
how you would like to be updated.
Those are very important things.
I want to be updated regularly for things,
and I expect to do the same for other people.
So if I'm working on a task for someone else,
or someone else is involved in said task,
or, you know, I'm working on a customer issue,
all of those things are important to keep a regular cadence
of updates, and be prepared to change that cadence.
You know, if it becomes a higher-level issue
or higher priority for the other person,
maybe you need to readjust your expectations.
So after adjusting your expectations,
think about, too, expressing empathy.
This is very important.
And I don't mean, oh, let's be sad and know they're having
a problem, like, really, oh, I'm so sorry, it's terrible.
They don't want your sympathy, they want your empathy.
They want you to understand the boat that they're in.
They want you to sit there and paddle with them.
They want to know that you fully comprehend the issue.
You fully comprehend that their boss is on them
for an answer about this, and they don't have one.
So you're also in that boat with them,
whether you like it or not.
And what you need to do is express empathy
and understanding, and those are very important skills
for your communication.
And that also means that you're gonna be willing
to adapt to other things.
This is super important in most jobs, but especially IT.
How fast is IT changing?
Being willing to adapt to the changing IT trends,
being willing to adapt, to say, hey, I'm willing to learn
that new technology that we just picked up,
being willing to adapt to changes.
You know, I worked at a company
and they changed ticketing systems
five times in the time that I worked there.
Five times!
So five times we had to learn how to ticket things
in our software.
We had to learn, all the engineers had to learn
how to use it, all of the customers had to learn
how to send things into it,
which for them was easy, 'cause it was mostly just email.
And now your company is gonna make changes
to the software that you use,
to the software that you send your customers.
All of those things are gonna change on, you know,
a fairly regular basis, if you think about it,
constantly evolving and changing new things,
and you have to be willing to make those changes with them
If you want to progress, or even if you just want to stay.
If you sit stagnated, eventually you're gonna become
obsolete and nobody wants that.
So it's very important to be adaptable,
to say, you know what, I hear you.
I hear that criticism to say,
my communication skills aren't very good,
so I'm gonna adapt and I'm gonna go take a class
on my own outside of work, and I'm gonna figure out
how to communicate better because this is important to me.
It shows that that your skills are as important to you
for what other people want as they are to you
for what you want.
The next essential skill that I want to talk about
is accountability.
Now, most people think about accountability
as being accountable for the bad things,
but I want to talk about also being accountable
for the good things.
Both parts are necessary.
They're necessary sides of the same coin.
Yes, you need to be accountable for the bad things.
You need to be held accountable so that you can fix it,
you can push past it, and you can plan to never
have that problem again, you know?
Let's not continuously make the same mistakes,
but let's not focus on just the mistakes.
Let's focus on the positive things, too.
Let's keep each other lifted up.
Let's talk about the good things that have happened.
You know, maybe a team member resolved an incident
in 30 minutes that was gonna take four hours.
Let's lift them up, claps all around, let's talk about it!
Let's also do it for ourselves, you know?
Keep a list for yourself.
You can use it during review time
if your manager has forgotten those good things.
It's way easier to forget the good stuff than the bad stuff,
unfortunately for us.
So what we do is we keep a list, and you can use that list
for inspiration for yourself.
You know, maybe you're having a bad day, you know?
An incident took you six hours to resolve,
and it turned out to be some silly thing
that you totally missed at the beginning.
That's happened to all of us.
So what you need is to look at that list and say,
you know what?
Remember two weeks ago when I resolved this problem?
Awesome! And then you'll feel better.
Balance yourself out.
It's very important to be accountable
for both the good things and the bad things.
The final skill I'm gonna talk to you about today
is collaboration, and I know you're thinking,
oh, teamwork, teamwork, everyone talks about teamwork.
We have team-building exercises and all of those things.
Those things are great, and they are useful tools
that management and team leaders
will use to bring you together.
But I'm not just talking about teamwork.
I'm talking about collaboration with others.
Whether that's with your sales guy down the next
row of offices, whether that's with someone in accounting
that's having trouble with their PC.
Whatever it happens to be, be willing and open
to collaborate with others.
It's a big deal, being able to cross that bridge and say,
hey, you know, we don't have a lot in common,
our jobs have nothing in common at all,
but I want to work with you on this task.
Be willing and open to collaborate.
It's very important to show
that you can play well with others.
I know you've heard that before, but it is important,
and you don't have to like a person personally
in order to collaborate with them.
I think respect is important,
it's a very important part of collaboration, you know?
Don't just take over, make sure you're including
the other people in that.
We're gonna work for collaboration on all things,
whether that's we're implementing a new tool,
or we're trying to solve this ticket,
but this ticket includes the finance department
and includes the IT department for whatever reason.
These things are important.
You want to be willing to collaborate with people
from other teams, be willing to collaborate
with external sources as needed.
I mean, how many times has a contractor been brought in?
Well, don't shut them out, work with them.
Make sure that it's a success.
Other people are watching, whether you know it or not,
and they're gonna see that you're working towards success
for your business and not just success for yourself.
That's an important part of collaboration.
So that wraps up the five skills I wanted to talk about
with you today, and notice I said, "skills."
Not soft skills, but there's just skills.
They're skills that are important,
they're just nontechnical,
and I think that we can all learn something from that.
And you might need to work on some of those skills,
take a look inside yourself and say,
you know what, am I good at this?
Am I good at talking to people?
I don't know.
And if you think that you're not good enough
at those skills, there's plenty of ways to improve.
You can talk to a friend or a colleague 'cause you noticed
that they're really good at communications,
the customers love them.
Or, you know, maybe you notice that their emails
are really well worded and maybe take a minute and say,
hey, can you talk me through this?
Can you tell me what you're thinking
when you're writing these things?
You know, maybe they rewrite it four times
before they send it.
So use those skills, use those things.
There's also a lot of options online,
some online communications courses, presentation courses,
you know, whatever it is that you might need,
there's a lot of options out there.
Even though we're in quarantine,
there's a lot of options out there for you
that don't involve seeing people in person,
where you can just take a mentor, you can take a class
online, and you can improve your skills a bit
so that you can progress in your career.
And I hope we all progress in our careers,
so thank you so much for joining me today.