A mechanic once told me that a clean shop is a sign of a man with too much time and a dirty shop is a sign of a man with too many mistakes. It is a false choice. You want the mechanic who fixes the brakes so you do not think about the brakes until the next service interval.
If he gives you a free bottle of water and a firm handshake but the pedal still sinks to the floor, the water is a distraction. You drink the water and you feel bad for him and you drive into a tree. We do this with IT support every day and we do it because we are afraid to be the villain in someone else’s performance review.
The “Politeness Mask”: When high ratings obscure critical system failures.
The Real Estate of Failing Networks
Bernadette runs operations for a commercial real estate firm in Long Island City. Her office looks out over the East River and the windows are large and the light is usually very good. She has six buildings under her care and the leasing desk in the main lobby is the heart of the machine. But the network jack behind that desk is failing. It has been failing since .
Danny is the technician. He arrived at on a Friday. He is a kind man with a tired face and he carries a heavy bag of tools that he rarely seems to need. He knows that Bernadette has a son in middle school and he knows that she prefers her coffee with a splash of oat milk. He brought her a coffee from the place on the corner and he spent forty minutes under the desk.
He wiggled the cable and he tightened a screw that did not need tightening and he smiled when he stood up.
“These old jacks, you know. They have a mind of their own.”
– Danny, Technician
He left at . At , the automated email arrived in Bernadette’s inbox. It asked if Danny had resolved the issue. It asked her to rate her experience on a scale of one to five.
Bernadette looked at the leasing desk. The light on the phone was already flickering. The connection was dropping again. She looked at the five stars on the screen and she thought about the coffee and she thought about the way Danny talked about his daughter’s softball tournament. She clicked the fifth star. She hit submit.
She felt like a good person but she was actually participating in a slow-motion sabotage of her own company. When Bernadette clicks those stars, the management at the IT company sees a green light on their dashboard. They see a satisfied client. They see a technician who is doing a great job.
They do not see the broken jack and they do not see that the root cause has been ignored for three months.
They have no reason to send a senior engineer and they have no reason to replace the wiring. The politeness of the interaction has successfully masked the incompetence of the service.
The Mercy Merge Bottleneck
Taylor E. is a traffic pattern analyst and he sees this same phenomenon on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. He studies the way “mercy merges” create three-mile backups. A driver stops to let someone in out of a sense of misplaced kindness and the sudden brake light ripples backward through four hundred cars.
Kindness to one = Friction for everyone.
The driver feels like a saint and the system dies. Technical support is a traffic flow of data and resolutions. When you prioritize the warmth of the merge over the speed of the transit, you create a bottleneck of unresolved tickets that eventually chokes the business.
Most small business owners confuse rapport with accountability. They think that because they like the person on their couch, the company behind that person is doing a good job. But in the world of managed IT, the person you like is rarely the person who decides the budget for the infrastructure.
The technician is the face of the brand but the engineering team is the spine. The survey records a warm relationship and misses a system that is not improving. The nicer the technician is, the more misleading the data becomes. We are training our vendors to be charming instead of being effective.
We are paying for a social club when we think we are paying for a firewall.
This is a specific failure of the “Help Desk” model. In that model, the goal is to close the ticket as fast as possible with the highest possible rating. It is a volume game. If the problem comes back next Tuesday, that is just another ticket and another opportunity for a five-star rating. It is a recurring revenue stream built on a foundation of recurring failures.
A Solution Through Separation
A real solution requires a separation of the relationship from the engineering. You need a technical account manager who cares about your business goals and you need senior engineers who care about why the jack is failing in the first place. They should not be the same person.
The engineer should be obsessed with the Meraki dashboard and the Fortinet configurations and the physical integrity of the Cat6 cabling. They should be so good at their jobs that you barely know their names because you never have to see them twice for the same problem.
At InterDataLink, the model is built on this distinction. You get a named technical account manager who understands the “why” of your business, but the “how” is handled by senior engineers who are dispatched to kill root causes.
They do not just wiggle the cable. They replace the jack. They test the line. They look at the switch. They treat a recurring ticket like a personal insult to their craft. They do not want your five stars for being “nice”; they want your business to run so well that the survey becomes an afterthought.
Stopping the Part of the Problem
I stopped giving five stars to the friendly guys because I realized I was part of the problem. I was the one telling the IT company that everything was fine when I was actually spending my Monday mornings rerouting cables myself. I was paying a monthly fee for the privilege of doing the work I hired them to do.
When you give a five-star rating to a failed repair, you are voting for the status quo. You are telling the provider that they can keep sending Danny with his stories and his coffee instead of sending an engineer with a punch-down tool and a plan. You are choosing a pleasant Friday afternoon over a functional Monday morning.
It is the cost of all the things you fix yourself because you do not want to “bother” the nice person who couldn’t fix it the first time. It is the cost of the downtime that you excuse because the technician was “so apologetic.”
The billable hours lost while watching a nice technician fail.
Premature failure from incorrect Cisco SD-WAN configurations.
Monday mornings spent rerouting cables yourself.
It is the cost of the hardware that dies prematurely because it was never configured correctly by someone who actually knew what a Cisco SD-WAN was supposed to look like.
Sending Someone to Fix the Wall
Bernadette eventually stopped clicking the stars. The next time the phone flickered, she did not wait for the survey. She called the manager.
“I like Danny very much. He is a gentleman. But he has been here five times for the same cable and the cable is still broken. Do not send Danny back. Send someone who can fix the wall.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. The manager was confused. His dashboard showed five stars across the board for that site. He thought the relationship was perfect. He thought Bernadette was his happiest client. He had been looking at a map of a city that did not exist.
The heat of the coffee in the lobby masks the cold reality of the server room.
The transition from a “help desk” mentality to an engineering-driven approach is not just a change in vendors. It is a change in how you value your own time. If you are a law firm or a CPA practice, your billable hours are your lifeblood. Every minute you spend watching a nice technician “reseat” a cable is a minute you are losing money.
You are not just paying the IT bill; you are paying the opportunity cost of the distraction. A real engineer does not want to be your best friend. They want to be the person who built a system so stable that you forget they exist.
They want to design a network with redundant failovers and secure endpoints so that the “Danny” visits become a relic of the past. They want to answer the phone in under an hour and fix the problem in because they actually have access to the senior-level configurations that a Tier 1 help desk technician is not allowed to touch.
Be Brave Enough to be “Unsatisfied”
We need to realize that a three-star rating for a friendly person who failed is more helpful than a five-star rating for a friend who cost us a day of work. If we want better systems, we have to stop rewarding the people who keep the broken ones running with a smile.
The next time the survey hits your inbox, look at the blinking light on your router before you look at the memory of the technician’s smile. If the light is red, the rating should be too. It is the only way the system learns.
It is the only way you get the service you are actually paying for. And it is the only way you get your Fridays back.