Guest: Dennis Irizarry, IT Specialist, BetterCloud
Episode description
Dennis Irizarry has been working in tech for 12 years, and in this episode, he and Ryan Bacon discuss using technology to improve user experience through different tools, automation, and improved workflows.
Listen to this episode of Where’s the Any Key? to hear what techniques and tactics Dennis uses in his organization to provide the best possible experience for his customers.
The following is a transcription of an episode of our podcast, Where’s The Any Key? Feel free to reach out with any questions you may have in response to this recording. You can find our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever podcasts are available.
Ryan Bacon: Welcome to Where’s the Any Key? the podcast where we talk shop about topics, tips, and trends for the modern IT admin. I’m your host Ryan Bacon, the IT Support Manager at JumpCloud®.
Introducing Dennis Irizarry
Ryan: Joining me today is Dennis Irizarry, he’s an IT Specialist at BetterCloud. How are you doing today, Dennis?
Dennis Irizarry: Good, Ryan. How are you doing today?
Ryan: I’m doing well, thanks. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself.
Dennis Irizarry: I am an IT specialist at BetterCloud for two years — former BetterCloud customer. Been working in tech for 12 years across a bunch of different industries, a bunch of different roles, whether it be tech support, sales, customer service sort of things. Worked in the media industry for a bit before coming to BetterCloud in 2019.
How Leveraging Technology Affects Customer Experience
Ryan: Awesome. What we’re going to chat about today is leveraging technology and how that affects the end user experience or the customer experience. I’ve been trying to break myself of saying end user and go more with customers, but it’s hard when you’ve been saying end user for years.
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah, of course. Of course. I mean both can be impacted depending on the industry you’re in, what your company does, what their product is. Yeah, all that comes in. End user, end customer can be one in the same sometimes.
Ryan: Yeah, and it’s more of a matter of perspective, really. So anyways, going on a tangent at the very beginning of the episode I think would be a record for us. So, technology and the customer experience, how leveraging technology can affect the customer experience. Why don’t you kick it off with your take on it?
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah, I mean I think my take on this, and this is based on experience of working in varying degrees of efficiency at BetterCloud, at other companies, and trying to find the gaps to reduce the work that my team is doing, what I’m doing every day and seeing what the end results of that are. I mean, us in IT, we all want to be more efficient at what we do. We want to perhaps try to have the robots click the buttons so we’re not clicking the buttons to free us up from other things. But I think it’s important to also see what the impact of that is outside of our everyday work. Just what our team is doing, the people that we report to. And what impact that has on our end users, our customers and their functions, their efficiency and ultimately their experience.
Because everyone is using technology in organizations, the better that we can provide them the tools to do their jobs, the better their experience is going to be. So everything is networked in that way.
Ryan: Yeah, and there’s so many aspects of someone’s day to day work life that can be impacted by how their IT team or person, however it’s set up, uses different technology, uses different products or tools to meet goals.
An example that I can think of that comes to mind early is I worked at a non profit and they had a guest check-in system. I use that with big air quotes, “guest check-in system.” What it was, it was an Access database. It just lived on one of the front desk computers and it was clunky. It wasn’t implemented super well. Somebody’s like, we have access to the Office suite, so Access is in here, we can make a database. That’s how they tracked it.
They were constantly running into problems. So when I started working here, I was at the tail end of grad school. And one of the classes I was taking was essentially a web development class. At the time it was our capstone. The idea was that you would create a website but leveraging stuff like your programming and your databases and all of this stuff. So of course when you’re working on it and for a class thing, you’re like oh, maybe I can do this new shiny thing for the organization. And I did.
Super basic. It was just a dynamic table where they can add people and could update the different rows and that it would reset itself every day but we could go into the database and run a query if we needed for previous days and that sort of thing. So very basic, but even that little thing streamlined things so much because it was run on a web server, not on an independent system. They were able to log into any computer.
The manager was able to even go and keep an eye on how things are going so if they get backed up they can pull in help from other areas and that sort of thing. On the surface, it’s a super simple thing. Well, I would like to think and from what I saw it did, that it really helped with the workflow for that area.
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah, of course. I mean this is something that there’s so many aspects to how a user or a customer interfaces with technology in any one given organization. Whether it be something like that. Whether it be the computer that they’re logged into every day. It could be just having the tools that they need. It could be their experience on day one which I find to be incredibly important. Because I think if an end user or a customer’s experience with a company or with a product is positive from the start, then that gives an IT team or teams or scrum teams the capacity to innovate and have buy-in from those different areas around the company that they might need buy-in from.
Ryan: Yeah, definitely. I’m glad you brought up the day one thing because I’m sure it’s similar with many IT teams out there that new hire onboarding is an important part of your job. The more manual a process is, the more prone it is to mistakes in my mind.
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah, of course.
Ryan: So using automation, like you said, having the computer push the buttons for you will make things a lot easier. Will make things less prone to errors and will make for a better first day experience for new hires because they’ll have what they need. They’ll be more prepared to start this new job. Which – starting a new job is stressful enough.
Dennis Irizarry: Of course.
Ryan: So adding to that if you don’t have access to the tools that you need and everything like that when you start, that makes it even more stressful.
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah. It’s also not just that person’s experience, it’s that person’s manager’s experience. Because then comes the tickets of: can you add this person to this distribution group? Can you permission this person to this platform? Meanwhile, you knew that person was starting, but if you’re able to automate that work ahead of time, obviously it frees up capacity for the IT team. But the person that’s starting on their first day, they’re happy because they have the tools they need and then their manager’s happy because they’re in the tools that they need to be in order to hit the ground running with whatever their function may be.
Ryan: Yeah, exactly. And along with automation while we’re talking about it, it’s important to note that when you automate a process, it’s not just one and done. You have to stay on top of it. We’ve gotten busy and we’ve not updated our onboarding script. And what happens is especially as a company’s growing and new roles are added or requirements change, everything like that, if those changes aren’t reflected in your onboarding script, you’re taking steps back and going to a more manual process while you’re going and fixing stuff up.
Yeah, if you’re running any kind of automation, any kind of especially an in-house built tool, you have to put in the time to stay on top of it and make sure that it’s up to date and useful.
Comparing Tech Companies
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah, definitely. I mean I work at BetterCloud, BetterCloud is a tool that solves for these sort of things. But even us internally, we took a very holistic view at what our onboarding looks like. This is something that I actually did. I documented every click of a mouse to get just a person, regardless of title and organization within the company, onboarded. All right, so how can we get these say 39 clicks down to less than 10?
What products are we using in our onboarding? So we have an IDP. We have BetterCloud of course. We’re a Google based company. What tools do we have and how can we leverage them with their built-in components to reduce this work and then what sorts of custom stuff do we have to do?
Then we went beyond that. It’s like layers of an onion.
Ryan: Exactly.
Dennis Irizarry: We have a full-time employee, cool. They need to be in these things. Then you have your location based stuff which is the second layer. Okay, if they’re based in this city, we’re going to want to make sure they’re in these Slack channels for this office. And then there’s the layer, org. Are they in sales? Are they in engineering? Then it gets further and further down.
So that’s something we are continuing. To your point, we had workflows for these things. We had both in a literal sense in BetterCloud but also in a more written down sense, but they were out of date. Some found hey, there’s a lot of stuff here we should be automating. We can automate, so we need to really devote the time to do this. That way we put the two hours in now to save us 20 hours down the road.
Ryan: Exactly. And you bring up BetterCloud which I do think is a really neat tool. That reminds me that both of us are in a similar situation. We are an internal IT team working for a company that develops a product geared towards IT people.
Dennis Irizarry: Exactly.
Ryan: I feel that’s a really interesting dynamic. So obviously, if BetterCloud’s anything like JumpCloud, the term used to be eat our own dog food, but now it’s going to be a little bit more classy of drinking our own champagne.
Dennis Irizarry: Oh yes, that’s the term that we like to use as well. It’s in our OKR’s. We try to drink our own champagne and leverage our product and be the poster child for using BetterCloud.
Ryan: Yeah. We do the same thing with JumpCloud. So as much as you can talk about it, what’s been your experience with that concept of using your own tool and being an internal representation of your organization’s customer?
Dennis Irizarry: We have always used it a lot, but we are trying to find not only how are we using it, but how can we improve how we’re using it. But also, we’ve been having more candid discussions with the folks in engineering and products around what things would we like to see the product do better for us. What are some hiccups whether it be a UI thing? What are some things that we would like to see to make our jobs easier? Because we are the best representation of what a customer’s going to be.
Ryan: Exactly.
Dennis Irizarry: We have the most direct access to the folks that are innovating these sort of things. To answer your question, we’re in a position to not only use a product to the best of our ability because it’s ours, but also to continue to innovate it and to break new grounds. And to create the experience for us so that way, getting back to the core of what we were talking, the better experience that we have using this product, whether it be any product, whether it’s JumpCloud, BetterCloud or any of the other tools that help with automation, is being able to directly impact the experience of our team so we can directly impact the experience of the teams that we service.
Ryan: So you were just talking about using the tools and your experience with that and how it translates to benefits for the end user. I think that that’s good that you brought it back to the end user, because that’s one thing that when I have discussions with our product team and that sort of thing, I don’t just take my team’s experience with it, but how will this translate to benefits for the users, the people that I support? That’s something that you always should be keeping in mind when looking at enhancements to existing tooling or looking at new solutions or anything like that. It’s not just what’s easier for you. It’s what’s easier across the board. But it’s up to you to decide what that balance looks like, because there are definitely going to be cases where you could put a solution into place that will make it easier for you but more difficult for your customers.
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah, definitely. I think that’s a balance that we’re always trying to ride. Whether it be from an information security standpoint. Whether it be a hardware standpoint. There’s that balance of what’s easy for the IT team, what’s easy for the user. And then also from a process standpoint, it’s like we have a way that we need to do things, but we have to think of directly how that’s going to impact the user. And if it can create any points of friction, how that could be alleviated. Whether that’s leveraging technology or processes or leveraging training or documentation or something like that to continue having your end users on your side when it comes to being able to do things that you want to do.
Ryan: Yeah, exactly. I think finding that balance also will come down to, I know this term gets thrown around a lot, but company culture. Here at JumpCloud, we put a lot of emphasis that we want to make things smooth and as seamless as possible for the average employee. I take that as a mandate that the IT team, we’re willing to take on that extra work to enhance the experience of the average employee.
My number one example is our helpdesk platform. When I started, there was no help desk. We were just a little scrappy start up. Things were very much shooting from the hip and just walking by my desk to make a request or sending me an email or Slack or something like that. There was a help desk that was set up but nobody was actually using it. My first priority was getting that ramped up and getting buy in and people actually using it and stuff like that.
Traditionally, with help desks, it’s very… go through these channels to make requests. Either log into the help desk and submit a request there or send an email. And that’s traditionally how it goes.
Getting buy-in for a new tool is always a challenge. We ended up getting decent buy in for that, but we were continuing to grow. Instead of trying to bring down the hammer and be like okay people, you have to go through and do this, change your practices to fit our workflow, we decided to change our workflow to fit their practices.
We ended up getting another help desk platform that is fully integrated with Slack and can also receive email requests. We get a Slack message whether it’s in a channel or DM, a couple clicks, that message is now a ticket.
Is it more work on us? Technically yes, but in the end, I feel that the benefit for everybody else who’s using it outweighs that little bit of extra work that we put into it. Well actually, now that I think about it more, it ended up being also less work for us in the end because we didn’t spend as much time trying to get people to go through the original channels of making a request. When it’s really a matter of just a couple seconds to turn a message into a ticket, then really that’s a win-win in my book.
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah, it’s ROI, but the investment isn’t money, it’s time, right?
Ryan: Exactly.
Dennis Irizarry: You put the time in. I think I said this earlier, you put the two hours in now to save yourself 20 hours down the road. Obviously getting a helpdesk system set up and changing company culture in order to use it and the training involved and the documentation involved and setting up the Slack integration and the forwarding email, yeah, that’s a lot more than two hours of work. But when it becomes so ingrained in the way that you do things now, yeah, it saves you a headache.
Obviously this may have been some time ago, but could you imagine if you didn’t put that work in before we all went to work from home a year ago?
Simplifying Remote Work
Ryan: Oh, man. I do honestly think that’s one of the reasons why we were able to make the transition to 100% remote so easily. I mean we were remote friendly beforehand, but there is definitely a difference between being remote friendly and being fully remote.
Dennis Irizarry: Trust me, I’m looking at three laptops in front of me I’m shipping out today. It very much is two different things. And it’s funny, I was actually talking to my team earlier this morning about how much life has changed and how much life may not change as things get better. But yeah, it was weird. A year ago, hey, we’ll be back in two weeks and then two weeks became two months and then two months became indefinitely. I think that… put more of an emphasis on automating tasks and what end user experience looks like, especially with folks that you’re not going to be shaking hands with. These are folks that are onboarding during this time that you may never meet.
An example of that is I have a guy on my team who’s been here for 11 months and I have yet to actually shake his hand, but I work with him every day. It’s super important to automate processes and to take a holistic look at the technology that you’re using in your org and the things that you’re doing and how they can be improved. Or maybe not even improved, but maybe just turned around a little bit and just retooled to fit the environment that we’re in.
Ryan: Exactly. I’m glad you brought up the shift to remote. First off, it’s crazy to think that it’s been nearly a year since the JumpCloud offices were shut down. And we’re not in any hurry to go back.
Dennis Irizarry: BetterCloud offices are not opening back up full time anytime this calendar year.
Ryan: In a way, I think that’s a smart move.
Dennis Irizarry: Absolutely.
Ryan: We don’t know what things are going to look like. And really, who wants to be that first person to open up and test the waters of a post pandemic office environment?
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah, definitely.
Ryan: I don’t want to be in that position. There’s plenty of times when you want to blaze trails and be a pioneer, but I don’t think that’s one of them.
Dennis Irizarry: I agree. I couldn’t agree more. Absolutely.
Ryan: With this remote environment and going to more of the process side of things, not just technology, I think the dynamic is totally different. Like you said, you can have new hires that you never meet. And especially if the company is growing, getting bigger and you pass that point of being able to have those individual relationships with everybody in the office. So not only that, but in a remote environment, it may just be a name that crosses your screen at one point and then that’s it.
I’m changing the paradigm of how I think of things. The classic saying is if a meeting could be taken care of in an email, then you should take care of it in an email and not schedule a meeting. In a lot of cases, I am turning that around to where if a meeting can happen without having to bend over backwards for scheduling and stuff like that, even if it can be handled in an email, you should really consider doing a meeting just so you can have the virtual face to face, maintain or establish connections with the people.
So even though maybe we just send troubleshooting instructions via Slack or via email, doing a Google Meet or a Slack video call or something like that is a nice way to improve that experience, that there is a connection between you and the people that you serve. I feel that that’s just as important as putting on, leveraging new technologies or new tools to help support your remote work environment.
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah, I mean when it comes down to it, people want to feel like they’re being taken care of. I couldn’t agree more on the notion … I personally do this where I will find 30 minutes on someone’s calendar to help them troubleshoot one on one via Zoom or Hangout, especially the folks that I don’t interface with regularly.
What I’ve been trying to do is a little bit of both of what you just mentioned. Which is the people that I meet with all the time, I’m like how can we condense these meetings or maybe make the cadence a little less. Because I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’m in more meetings now than I was a year ago. But, those troubleshooting interactions or not even troubleshooting, maybe it’s sometimes social and maybe there’s someone that just started at the company that obviously you haven’t met, and you want some one on one time to understand what they’re doing because their job directly impacts you. That’s incredibly important. To make those connections is incredibly important.
So yeah, I think that’s a really solid point in this new normal of remote work where we’re not going to be shaking hands with folks we maybe sometimes work with or work with a lot or maybe don’t work with, but it’s still important for them to know who you are and what you do in order for them to know who their resources are when they do have technical issues. When they want to implement something. Or this is now uniquely something with our two companies being SaaS companies that people buy, the folks that are selling the product to come to us as a resource to get our opinions from an industry perspective.
Ryan: Yeah, definitely. And tying technology into this more personable aspect of it, the social aspect of it, there are definitely tools out there that can help facilitate these things. So we use a Slack app that’s called Donut. And what it does is-
Dennis Irizarry: We use it as well.
Ryan: It’s super helpful. So for those people who don’t know, Donut is a Slack app where you add it to a channel and then people join said channel. You set a cadence and what will happen is every three weeks or whatever you set, it pairs people up for just essentially water cooler chat. It’ll say hey, you and you schedule some time to just 20… 30 minutes, however long, just schedule some time to get to know each other.
For me, I look forward to these things. While I definitely have my introverted tendencies, I still crave social interaction. I’ll get to that point where I need to talk to people. I do that. With working from home and not having the opportunities for those impromptu conversations, those water cooler conversations, having something there to facilitate it has been really nice for me mentally. But also it helps me get to know the people that me and my team support and helps us to feel more as an overall team, a bigger organization. That we’re all in this together, that sort of thing.
Dennis Irizarry: Couldn’t agree more. Absolutely.
Implementing New Tools to Impact User Experience
Ryan: What other ways can you think of where a new tool or implementing a new tool or policy has made a drastic impact on your customer’s experiences?
Dennis Irizarry: I mean something that I was really trying to work through over the summer was developing a training program for the folks at BetterCloud. All the tools that we use. In BetterCloud’s case, that would be all the different facets of Google Workplace, Formally G Suite, Zoom, Slack. Just having resources for folks to one help our IT team so that way people have resources so they don’t have to open up tickets for things. But also, I mean it could be a viral thing if you teach a man to fish.
That’s something that I continue to be very passionate about, about giving folks the tools they have and the resources available to them. Because it’s self-serving in a sense. It’s reducing the amount of tickets that an IT team may get.
But also opening their eyes to some things they might not have known. Things like Gmail filters. Things like organizing, which I love this feature that Slack implemented with being able to organize all your channels and all your conversations and have different sub folders and put a little emoji next to it based on what the topic may be. Things like that are the sort of things that we continue to make sure our users know about it so that way they can have an easier, more fun time working and doing the work that they do.
Ryan: Yeah, that’s a good one. Documentation is always a fight to keep it updated.
Dennis Irizarry: Oh, definitely. Definitely.
Ryan: When you get busy, that’s one of the first things to go by the wayside. One of the projects that one of our team members is working on is getting our documentation not only updated, but to convert all of these Google docs into a wiki so it’s better organized, our team has access to it.
But then we were talking about it and it’s like okay, while we’re at this, maybe we should make our own internal knowledge base for everybody else in JumpCloud to use. Because we’ve done a lot of work when there’s a new feature in one of the tools that we use. We’ll send out an email being like “hey, here’s how you use this feature.” Or we’ve implemented a lot of Slack auto responses with useful information. Like when we were in the office, instructions on how to set up your printer and all of that stuff.
But yeah, we have those auto responses, but how do people know what auto responses there are out there? So there’s all this information that you put out into the world at a point in time. But first off, as time passes, people forget.
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah, of course.
Ryan: Because they’re human.
Dennis Irizarry: And then new folks join and they might not have caught that. Something that BetterCloud started doing when we went remote is by having a cadence of all hands meetings. Short, 30-minute all hands meetings every week. We were doing it twice a week. We’ve got it down to once a week. And our team, we did this I think at least two times, we might have done it three times. Time’s a construct. It passes by.
But we had a work from home tips and tricks session with different platforms. Yeah, because we can put out a help desk article or a K-based article. Doesn’t mean anyone’s going to read it. But here we have a platform as a Zoom meeting where we can maybe teach some folks how to do things that they might not have known how to do to make their lives easier. And we’ve done that a few times and we’re going to continue doing it as our team has grown, as BetterCloud has grown, because we’re continuing to hire folks that this might be their first time actually working remote.
Or we have some entry level folks that this is their first job out of college, so they might be completely unfamiliar with a lot of the technology that we use. This might be their first time using Slack or Zoom which is hard for us as IT folks to wrap our heads around because we’ve been using all these tools and tools like it for as long as we’ve been doing this.
Yeah, I think it’s not just having documentation which is great, but to your point, keeping documentation up to date is another thing. But it’s also how folks consume information and whether that’s at work or in their everyday lives, it varies. Some people prefer different ways of absorbing information. We’re trying to figure out all the best ways in order to do that.
Ryan: Yeah, definitely. Having your team do a presentation to a live audience, being able to field questions at the moment, with people being like hey, that’s impossible to replicate just with a knowledge base or a wiki.
And something that I haven’t brought up to my team yet but that I’ve been toying around with is maybe setting time every week or every other week or once a month, whatever cadence we determine. But doing an IT office hours thing where you don’t necessarily have to give a presentation, but have there be a time where somebody is just sitting on a video call so that people can just come in the door, can jump in, have conversations about stuff.
I haven’t given it a ton of thought as you can probably see. I’m just riffing here.
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah, it’s an abstract sort of thing.
Ryan: Maybe have a theme or something like that. But giving people the ability to interact with you on whatever the face to face basis is nowadays, through live interaction. I think that would be incredibly valuable. Not only as a resource to share information with your users, but as just a way to stay in contact with them, to build and maintain rapport. Pretty much stay away from being those ambiguous IT guys who are just lurking in the shadows in the background.
Dennis Irizarry: They’re in some dark cavern in the basement of an office building somewhere.
Ryan: Exactly. Yeah, I’m looking at that. We’ll see how that goes, but I am thinking that would be beneficial, especially since our team’s grown and we have a little bit more breathing room.
You and I were talking about this before we started recording about team size and making sure you have enough people to support your users. And timing it so that you’re not just trying to play catch up all the time.
Something for those of you out there who would like to implement these practices, they are time consuming. There is no doubt about that. But if you structure it, if you go at it from the angle of it’s enriching the employee experience which is not only just a good experience for the employee, but it makes it easier for you to do your job with those relationships. So take it from that angle as opposed to well if we have another head count, we have another FTE, another team member, whatever, we will have the bandwidth to answer X number of more tickets. You have to look at it as you said more holistically.
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah, not even answer X amount tickets, but potentially to reduce the amount of volume that you receive every day. It comes back full circle. You bring on someone else which we’re looking to do in the Atlanta area. So you bring on someone else to help free up some capacity. And with that capacity, you continue to innovate in hopes of automating our work, but also just to continue to leverage our experience and the experience of our users.
Ryan: Yeah, exactly. Because I mean when you come down to it, the role of IT, at least in my mind, the role of IT is to improve business processes, to increase business efficiency. That’s not just answering tickets and fixing broken computers. The more proactive that you’re able to get, the better you’re able to actually tackle that base goal, especially the efficiency part of it.
And that’s how IT, which is traditionally a cost center… that’s how you show your value since you can’t necessarily show ROI and that sort of thing. How did we make things more efficient? How did we make things more secure? How did we improve how the business functions, how the organization functions and that sort of thing?
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And when you work in IT, you’re at a weird… what’s the best way for me to put this… you have your hands on so many different aspects of an organization, whether that be recruiting, HR, for us, the folks that are selling the product that we use, that are marketing the product that we use. All those different things. And then obviously, we’re interfacing with the folks that lead different departments to make sure that they’re running effectively and efficiently. Yeah, it’s a really cool place to be. And with that, it gives you a lot of different lenses to look at how in IT we are performing.
Ryan: Yeah, exactly. And it’s one of the reasons why I love doing what I do is because not only do you get to scratch that technical itch of working with hardware, software, that sort of thing. It’s that problem solving itch. But you also if you’re willing, because you can definitely just put yourself in a silo and focus on fixing computers and answering tickets and stuff. But if you’re willing to step back and take a broader view, you can get exposure to so many different aspects of the business, the finance and sales and marketing and stuff like that.
One of the ways that I give back to the IT industry is that I do answer those questions from our sales team. I do answer those questions from our marketing team when they come to me for insight. Because I figure that if I can help them be the kind of sales and marketing people that I like working with, with the vendor client relationship, that hopefully that would help other IT admins, IT pros that they work with when trying to do our product. So that’s my way of giving back.
Also, the different aspects of their roles and their tasks and everything like that, I also just find fascinating. I would never want to be a salesperson or a marketer, but I do like peeking into their world every once in a while.
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah, I tried AMAs, the Ask Me Anything, with the folks in business development, sales development. Because they’re in a world that they didn’t go to college for. They are not IT pros, but they’re selling to IT pros. They’re selling a product into an industry where their customer knows more about the industry than they do and that’s a difficult place to be, so I try to be that resource as well just like you said. I try to interface with all those folks for them to continue to use me as a resource, but also to pull back the curtain a little into what the daily life may be.
Ryan: Yeah, definitely. And not only that, I would say that IT people are probably some of the most difficult customers to have.
Dennis Irizarry: Yeah, absolutely. We’re a diverse bunch to say the least. So yeah, we’re difficult as it is. But the point I was trying to make with being diverse is we come from a variety of backgrounds and training and education and personality types. You got the folks like Jimmy Fallon was on SNL where he just pushes people out of the way and solves their problem for them. And then I like to think that I’m quite the opposite of that and I try to be a partner in folks being able to resolve their issues. Yeah, you’ve got a wide range of folks that you’re dealing with and it’s certainly not easy. Talk to some of the folks that are selling technology out there. It’s not easy.
Closing Remarks
Ryan: No, it’s definitely not. So that’s all the time that we have for today. Again, my guest has Dennis Irizarry, an IT specialist at BetterCloud. Dennis, thank you again for joining us. It has been a pleasure.
Dennis Irizarry: Thanks, Ryan. Really appreciate it.
Ryan: Thank you for tuning into Where’s the Any Key. If you like what you heard, please feel free to subscribe. Again, my name is Ryan Bacon. I lead IT at JumpCloud where the team here is building a cloud-based directory platform that provides frictionless, secure access to virtually any IT resource from trusted devices anywhere. You can learn more and even set up a free account today.