The other day, I found myself on the phone for many hours with one of our telephone providers. We were troubleshooting a rather complex issue, and I had to call back at least a half dozen times before the problem was fixed. At the start of each of these calls, I typically spoke to someone in their first level support department. And during several of those interactions, the support person read the case notes and asked me what a particular acronym meant.

As it turned out, I knew what the acronym stood for, since it corresponded to something the tier two and tier three support staff had spoken to me about. But if the higher level people were using this term left and right, why hadn’t that information trickled down to tier one?

Clearly, the company should be doing a better job educating its new hires about the predominant company lingo, including any acronyms that are typically used by more experienced staff. That way, new staff won’t have to ask customers what the company’s own terminology means, which should make those new employees more confident in their abilities and more productive at their jobs.