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 for—big, small, fast, slow—there’s always been one constant:
No one knows who to go to for help.
It’s your first day. You can’t log in. Is that an IT issue? An HR issue?
You need access to an app tied to a diagnostic platform that uses Entra SSO. Is that app support? The platform team? Identity management?
And good luck if the answer is “some combination of all three.”
Welcome to the Maze
Here’s how most companies try to handle this:
- Step 1: Dump everyone into a shared mailbox
- Step 2: Hope someone responds
- Step 3: If you’re the one responding, CC everyone to “claim” the ticket
- Step 4: Spend more time managing the thread than solving the issue
You haven’t even started troubleshooting, and already you’ve burned cycles on ambiguity, overlap, and admin overhead.
Would you accept this as a customer support model?
Would you make your paying customers figure out where to send their problem?
Of course not.
So why do we do it to employees?
This Problem Is Getting Worse—Thanks to SSO
SSO is great for users. But operationally? It’s a nightmare when ownership is fragmented.
The domain is managed by IT.
The SSO provider is managed by security.
The app is managed by product.
The support tool is managed by customer success.
The internal data behind it is managed by analytics.
You can’t get in. Who owns the fix?
If your best guess is “all of them,” you don’t have a support system.
You have a choose-your-own-adventure.
What I’ve Started Doing
At SHIELD Illinois and beyond, I’ve started building centralized internal support desks that operate like a proper intake system.
- Employees don’t have to figure out who owns what
- A single intuitive form collects just enough info to route the request
- If it’s misrouted, it gets reassigned without losing visibility
- Tickets have an assignee, a status, and a resolution timeline
It works. Not because the system is perfect—but because the burden is on the structure, not the individual.
Just like 911 doesn’t ask if it’s a police, fire, or medical issue—our support desk doesn’t expect employees to route their own needs.
The Core Principle: Don’t Make Internal Support Worse Than External
You’d never ask your customer to:
- Figure out what department owns their issue
- Email a shared inbox and wait
- Wonder if their issue was even received
- Ping five people just to get an update
So why is that acceptable internally?
If you say your people are your most important asset,
you better treat them like your most important customer.
Good Internal Support Is Just Good Ops
Clean routing.
Clear ownership.
Easy intake.
Structured escalation.
That’s not overengineering—it’s respect.
And it’s the kind of system that scales with your business without scaling frustration.
If your internal support would embarrass you in front of a paying customer,
don’t defend it. Fix it.