Your Internal Support System Wouldn’t Survive 5 Minutes with Customers
Your employees are your most important customers. Treat them like it.
In every company I’ve worked with—big, small, fast, slow—one problem shows up without fail: no one knows where to go for help.
You’re a new hire. You can’t log in. Is that an IT issue? Or HR? You need access to an app that uses Entra SSO. Maybe that falls under app support, the platform team, or identity management. And if the real answer is “some combination of all three,” then welcome to the maze.
Most companies think they’ve solved this. They haven’t. They dump everything into a shared mailbox and hope for the best. If someone does reply, they CC five people to “claim” the ticket, and suddenly you’re trapped in a thread that takes more effort to manage than the actual problem you’re trying to solve. And we haven’t even started troubleshooting yet.
Imagine doing this to a paying customer. You wouldn’t. You’d never ask them to figure out where their issue fits or make them chase status updates across a disorganized mess of inboxes. But we do it to our employees all the time. And then we wonder why internal systems feel slow, political, or broken.
It’s gotten worse with SSO. What used to be a basic login issue now lives at the intersection of multiple teams: IT manages the domain, security owns the identity provider, product owns the app, customer success supports the platform, and analytics owns the data underneath. If five teams “sort of” own the experience, then no one really owns it—and no one is accountable for fixing it.
What I’ve Started Doing Instead
At SHIELD Illinois and in every ops-led environment since, I’ve built internal support desks that function more like intake systems than inboxes. They don’t rely on employees knowing who owns what. They collect just enough information to route requests intelligently, and if something lands in the wrong place, it gets reassigned without losing visibility. Every request has an owner, a timeline, and a resolution path. It’s not fancy. It’s just clear.
Think of it like 911: you don’t need to know whether you’re calling the police, fire department, or EMS. You dial one number, and the system figures it out. That’s how internal support should work. Not because it’s elegant—but because it’s effective.
Internal Support Is Operational Excellence
Too many companies treat internal support as an afterthought—a shared Slack channel, a Google Form, a shrug. But if you say your people are your most important asset, then you need to treat them like your most important customers.
Would you ever expect your customer to guess which team owns their issue? To wait in silence after sending an email to a help address? To ping five different people for an update?
Of course not. So don’t accept it internally.
The truth is, good internal support isn’t a luxury. It’s just good ops. Clean routing. Clear ownership. Easy intake. Structured escalation. These aren’t signs of a bloated bureaucracy—they’re signs of respect. And they scale.
If your internal support system would embarrass you in front of a paying customer, don’t justify it. Fix it.