Who is my customer?

My final job in my previous career was at a hospital. I worked there for five years in the 90s before getting my first position as a developer. While I didn’t love the career I was leaving, I did appreciate what I learned from that last job.

Part of the onboarding included a short class on customer service. Going in, I didn’t expect to learn much, but I soon found out that I hadn’t really understood customer service or who my customer was. In this case, customer service didn’t mean handling complaints, but a mindset of how to work each day. Sure, the ultimate customers at a hospital are the patients, but many hospital employees have little or no patient contact. In my case, I didn’t interact with them but what I did directly affected patients. I also needed to realize that how I worked with and treated others in the department and beyond also affected patients. The culture at this hospital was wonderful. For the most part, I saw efficiency, cooperation, communication, and respect which led to wonderful customer service.

I’ve worked at a few places that didn’t have the same culture of internal customer service. I depended on another team back when I was a DBA for things like new servers and internal IP addresses. One of the team members would never provide timely updates, sometimes not even when the task was complete. Once a server for a project was ready for a week or so without anyone letting me know it was ready. I was told that he didn’t bother communicating updates to others in IT, only to other departments. He didn’t understand (or maybe care) that not communicating about the server was stopping progress of a project that ultimately affected the company’s paying customers. After complaining about this and other similar incidents, his manager said that I shouldn’t expect to receive the same level of customer service that I provided.

I think that an essential part of customer service means treating the others that you work with the same way that you would want to be treated. I learned about customer service almost 30 years ago, and that lesson has served me well ever since.

Kathi Kellenberger

Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums

If you have SQL Compare, then the SQL Snapper utility is very valuable 'extra' for certain team activities, because it can be freely distributed. It means that any developer can create a SQL Compare snapshot from databases that are on their local workstation and store them on the network.

Many AIs that appear to understand language and that score better than humans on a common set of comprehension tasks don’t notice when the words in a sentence are...

If you have come from a windows background you may...

Long List Of Demands Many suggestions for making changes or improvements to a process in a database are met like orders that mean, if not certain, then likely death....

Query Store is a configuration that is enabled per database, and the plans and stats for queries executed in that database are stored in the database itself. So what... The...

       Analyzing data in Azure Cosmos DB by using one of its API used to be the only way to analyze data. Using OLTP Database as source of...

I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks going over how to add your database to source control using Azure Data Studio...

You work with data, and you’re thinking about getting a Microsoft certification. Which one should you get? If you need the certification to get a job… Then get the...

The PowerShell community is beginning another year in the world of PowerShell 7...

Last week I have mentioned the new functions waiti...

Year 2020 has had a tremendous impact on our lives and has driven many changes. Since last year was a year of radical changes (which we were or were...

As we share what we’ve learned—and continue to learn—on how to bring data to life, we recently added a new makeover page, which illustrates concrete tips with real-world examples....

Welcome back to our journey of five questions to ask yourself when designing a graph for explanatory purposes. In yesterday’s post, we saw the importance of stripping away non-essential...

Data Science From Scratch: First Principles with Python by Joel Grus I absolutely loved this book. It has chapters introducing many aspects of data science, and then has many...

Click to learn more about author Wayne Yaddow. In Part 1 of this series, we described how data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) projects are a high priority...

When inserting rows into a heap, SQL Server must sometimes update the PFS page which can PFS contention and affect performance. In this article, Uwe Ricken demonstrates how to measure PFS contention.

Git is hard, probably harder than it needs to be but I have been using it for about 5 years and have a workflow that works for me. I... The...

Flyway is a multi-platform, cross-database version control tool. Carlos Robles explains Flyway’s history and shows how it works.

Small data that is hard to be notic...

SharePoint lists are popular and simple tools for ...

Click to learn more about co-author Adam Carrigan. Click to learn more about co-author Jorge Torres. Traditionally, machine learning tools were only available to enterprises with the necessary budget...

In the previous article and video, I explained a m...

Happy New Year. We wish this be a year full of hap...

Saving the Day from Delay Part 1 Optimizing your data model can be a daunting task. If you read the intro to this series, you know one of the...

Not sure what Power BI Paginated Reports are or ho...

Some time ago I wrote a pair of popular posts about using the Query and RelativePath options of the Web.Contents function in Power Query and why they are important...

Thanks for watching this week's Power BI news roun...

James McGillivray (blog|twitter) wants us to give ...

This month’s TSQL Tuesday invite is from James McGillivray – he asks people to write about what they were/are doing to take a break during this crisis ridden time...

I recently wrote about how I teach, in response to a T-SQL Tuesday post from 2010. This is a continuation of that theme, suggested by my own editor. Thanks,...

I’m a day late for T-SQL Tuesday this month, literally because I was taking a break. Yesterday I took a holiday to go snowboarding with a friend. The weekend... The...

Python is the most famous development language tod...

The famous countdown game loved among mathematicians and people adoring numbers and why not find a way to check for solutions.

by Hong Ooi This is an update on what’s been happening with the AzureR suite of packages. First, you may have noticed that just before the holiday season, the...

SQL Server tech interview questions must be well crafted to make sure the candidate actually knows the topic. In this article, Sergey Gigoyan provides his favorite questions for interviewing SQL Server developers.

Not easy to say, Gareth passed away a few days ago...

Thirteen years ago, I met Gareth Swanepoel (@Garet...

Last week we lost another SQLFamily member. Gareth...

Gareth Swanepoel passed away on 8 Jan 2021, He was an enthusiastic and joyful member of the speaker community, who has attended and spoken at many events over the years. An updated memorial is the link.

Microsoft announced updates today for all supporte...

Last month I posted a challenge to create an efficient number series generator. The responses were overwhelming...

It is a tiny query in size but can play a crucial ...

There are features many of us shy away from, like cursors, triggers, and dynamic SQL. T

T-SQL query to find the list of objects referring Linked Servers The post T-SQL query to find the list of objects referring Linked Servers appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

Total: 1 Average: 5 Much too often, we see poorly written complex SQL queries running against the database tables. Such queries may take a very short or a very...

Extra, Extra Temporal tables are cool, but keeping all that history can be stressful. Change Tracking adds overhead to every transaction, and requires Snapshot Isolation to be successful. Change...

Total: 2 Average: 5For some people, it’s the wrong question. SQL CURSOR IS the mistake. The devil is in the details! You can read all sorts of blasphemy in the entire...

Total: 1 Average: 5 This article describes the SQL Server ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN statement. The purpose of this statement is to add a new column to an existing...