Jargon

“Incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession.” – Kingman Brewster, Jr.

Jargon impresses no one—especially your clients. More than likely, they do not care how many letters you have after your name, how many years you have in the field, or even if you graduated high school. If you try to explain connectivity issues like this:

“The TCP/IP stack is called a stack because it contains 4 layers chained together. Sometimes the links between layers can become broken resulting in total loss of connection to the network. If you experience total connection loss and you get no reply when you type “ping 127.0.0.1” at the command prompt your stack has probably become corrupted. If you get a reply from the ping, but still can’t connect to the network your problem is elsewhere.”

You may have just totally confused your clients and made them feel like idiots. Sounding pretentious will not impress your clients. Being able to explain the problem and solution in a way that is understandable will. Furthermore, eliminating the jargon and communicating on a “down to Earth” level opens the door to educate your clients on the technology they are running.

Explaining situations and solutions in laymen term doesn’t mean you are dumbing yourself down. It simply means that you are accurately describing the situation to your clients so that they can understand. Many times, they don’t even have to understand the entire concept.

“That thing unexpectedly broke causing you not to surf the Internet. The reason why it broke is currently unclear, however; I can replace it and get you back up and surfing. After words, I will investigate to see if this is something that can be prevented in the future.”

Michael D. Alligood
Partner Sales & Support, ExchangeDefender & Shockey Monkey
michael@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x707