IT Support - Why wait for users to call?

In my 13 years of IT - Which is an admittedly short time in the workforce, but a long time in the world of IT - I have seen tech develop at an unbelievable rate. My first IT Support job was using Novell Netware and Windows NT4, and now here I am supporting Windows 10 and the latest version of OSX. I'm currently walking around with more computing power in my pocket than I had in my desktop 5 years ago. Tech has changed my life, and I'd bet it's changed most of your lives too.

Although tech has advanced at a phenomenal rate, IT Departments have not. In my time supporting users, I have found that companies continually chase the elusive customer satisfaction. You encourage the support techs to sit and wait for users to call, and then spend tens of thousands of dollars on consultants to tell you why Customer Satisfaction is low, and how to improve it.

You're being reactive, and you need to stop it. You need to empower the techs who are at the coalface to get up and go and talk to end users, to sit with them and find out what annoys them about IT from day to day. You need to provide lunch and learns for your end users. You need to look at the data that's coming in, the trends in the tickets that are logged, and the users who call the most. Listen to the techs who are in the trenches, they know the pain points, they hear the frustration first hand on a day to day basis.

Look at why your users are calling. Don't tell your techs to reset passwords. Empower them to come up with a solution to teach users how to reset their own passwords. Empower your techs to empower end users, which will result in less phone calls and less tickets. Move away from being reactive and go and fix something without having to be asked by an end user, and your end users will love you, and your entire IT department for it. They will stop being afraid of technology, and embrace it. As people who work in IT, it's our job to help them embrace technology and see it as a strength, rather than a burden to their day. Help your end users love technology.

None of the above is what I would call revolutionary thinking, it really all comes down to one question; Why are you waiting for your users to call?