Most IT companies can fix your problems. Fewer can explain them. Here's what plain-English IT support looks like and why it matters for your Michigan business.
TL;DR: Jargon in IT support isn't expertise. It's a communication failure, and it costs more than most businesses realize. When your team can't understand what their IT company is telling them, they stop asking for help, stop reporting problems early, and start working around issues instead of solving them. The IT companies that get this right don't just fix things. They leave your team more capable than before the call.
There's a particular kind of conversation that happens in IT support every day. Something breaks, someone calls, the technician explains what happened in a sentence full of acronyms, and the caller nods along without understanding any of it. The ticket gets marked as resolved. The same issue comes back two weeks later. And your team has quietly decided that calling IT isn't worth the confusion.
Think about someone trying to explain World of Warcraft to a person who's never played a video game. The explanations are technically accurate. The terminology is precise. And the person on the receiving end understands approximately none of it, not because they're not capable, but because the entire frame of reference is missing. That's what IT jargon does. It's a language that makes perfect sense inside the system and almost none outside it.
The IT industry has spent decades optimizing for technical depth. Certifications test whether a technician can configure a firewall. They don't test whether that technician can explain to a business owner why the firewall matters and what it's actually protecting. So you end up with technically capable people in client-facing roles who've never been asked to develop the skill that client-facing roles actually require.
That gap has real consequences. A team that dreads calling IT doesn't report suspicious emails early. A business owner who can't understand what their provider is telling them can't make informed decisions about their own technology. And a relationship built on nodding along rather than actual understanding is one that's already starting to erode.
Most IT companies can fix your problems. Fewer can explain them in a way that actually means something to you. Here's what the difference looks like.
Table of Contents
- Why Geek Speak Happens, Intentionally or Not
- What Jargon Actually Costs Your Business
- The Security Consequence Nobody Connects to Communication
- What Good IT Communication Feels Like From the Inside
- How to Tell If Your IT Company Speaks Your Language
- Understanding Your Own Technology Shouldn't Require a Translator
- Key Takeaways
- Frequently Asked Questions
Why Geek Speak Happens, Intentionally or Not
Most IT technicians don't use jargon to confuse people. They use it because it's the language they think in. When you spend your days inside technical systems, the shorthand becomes natural. DNS propagation, MX records, VLAN configuration: these terms are precise and efficient when you're talking to another technician. They're close to useless when you're talking to a business owner who needs to know whether their email is going to work this afternoon.
CompTIA, one of the leading IT industry certification bodies, identifies communication as one of the most critical professional skills in IT, specifically the ability to explain problems and solutions in a way the person can quickly and easily understand. The technical knowledge is the baseline. The communication is what makes it useful to anyone outside the server room.
The problem is that most IT hiring and training focuses heavily on the technical side and lightly on the communication side. Certifications test whether a technician can configure a firewall. They don't test whether that technician can explain to a business owner why the firewall matters. So a lot of technically capable people end up in client-facing roles without the one skill those roles actually require most.
It's worth noting that some jargon is genuinely unintentional. A technician who's been living inside these systems for years may not realize that "the TTL settings on your DNS records were misconfigured" means nothing to the person on the other end of the call. They're not trying to confuse you. They just forgot that the frame of reference they take for granted isn't shared. That's a training and culture problem, not a character problem. But it's still your problem when it shows up in your support experience.
What Jargon Actually Costs Your Business
The cost of poor IT communication rarely shows up on any report, but it's real and it compounds.
When your team can't understand what their IT company is telling them, a few things happen in sequence. They stop asking follow-up questions because the answers are more confusing than the problem. They stop reporting small issues early because the last time they called, they walked away no more informed than before. And they start working around problems instead of solving them, because the path of least resistance is to not involve IT at all.
That last pattern is the most expensive. A team that avoids calling IT doesn't report the suspicious email before it becomes an incident. They tolerate the recurring login error until it becomes a system failure. They find informal fixes that sort of work and hope nothing bigger breaks. Every one of those workarounds is a cost that never appears on an IT invoice and never gets attributed to communication. It just shows up as a business running slower and less securely than it should.
There's also a leadership cost worth naming. When your team has learned that IT interactions aren't worth the confusion, the business owner starts absorbing technology decisions that should belong to the IT partner. Not because the owner wants to be involved, but because nobody else is providing clarity in a language that allows anyone else to make informed decisions. That's not a technology problem. That's a communication problem that's become a management problem.
The Security Consequence Nobody Connects to Communication
Here's the connection most businesses haven't made: poor IT communication is a security problem, not just a service quality problem.
Your employees are your first line of defense against phishing, social engineering, and the kind of low-level suspicious activity that precedes most serious incidents. But that defense only works if your team feels comfortable reporting things. If calling IT means a confusing conversation that leaves them feeling talked down to or like they wasted everyone's time, they stop calling. And the next time something lands in their inbox that doesn't look right, they make a judgment call on their own instead of flagging it.
Most security awareness training focuses on teaching employees to recognize threats. That's necessary. What gets less attention is whether the culture around IT makes it easy or hard to act on that recognition. An employee who spotted a suspicious email and reported it promptly is doing exactly what every security training program asks them to do. An employee who spotted the same email wasn't sure if it was worth bothering IT about, and decided to just delete it, is one click away from being a statistic.
The difference between those two employees often isn't training. It's whether their previous experiences with IT left them feeling like reporting something was worth it. That's a communication problem with a security consequence, and as we explored in Make IT Kind: Why the Best IT Companies Lead with People, Not Tickets, it's one of the clearest reasons why the way your IT company talks to your team matters as much as the technical controls they put in place.
What Good IT Communication Feels Like From the Inside
There's a specific feeling that comes from a good IT interaction, and most people recognize it even if they've never named it. The problem got fixed. You understand what happened. You know what to watch for if it comes up again. And you hang up feeling slightly more capable than when you called. That's the standard worth holding your IT company to.
It doesn't require elaborate explanations or lengthy follow-ups. It requires a technician who closes every ticket with a brief, plain-language summary of what happened and what was done. Who sets a clear expectation when something is going to take time, rather than leaving your team wondering whether anyone is working on it. Who treats the question "Can you explain that in plain English?" as a completely reasonable request rather than an imposition.
From the inside, good IT communication also feels like consistency. Not just one technician who happens to be good at explaining things, but a culture where everyone on the team approaches client interactions the same way. Where the expectation isn't just that the technical problem gets solved, but that the person on the other end of the call walks away informed. That consistency is a hiring and training decision, not a personality lottery.
The contrast is easy to identify once you've experienced both. One interaction leaves you nodding along, hoping for the best. The other leaves you with something you can actually use. The technical outcome might be identical. The experience of the relationship is completely different, and over time, that difference determines whether your team trusts IT enough to pick up the phone when something seems off.
How to Tell If Your IT Company Speaks Your Language
A few things worth paying attention to, whether you're evaluating a current provider or considering a new one.
When a ticket closes, do you receive an explanation of what happened in language you can actually understand? Or does the notification just say "resolved" with no context? That single habit, or its absence, tells you a lot about how the provider thinks about its job.
When something is taking longer than expected, do you hear from them before you have to ask? Or do you find yourself following up to find out what's happening with your own systems? Proactive communication during open issues is one of the clearest signals of a provider who treats the relationship as more than a queue to manage.
When your team members call with questions, do they come back from those interactions feeling more capable? Ask them directly. The answer is usually immediate and honest, and it tells you more about the quality of the support relationship than any SLA metric ever will.
When you ask a straightforward question about your own technology, do you get a straight answer in plain terms? Or do you get a technical response that requires a follow-up question to decode, which requires another follow-up, until you've given up and moved on?
None of these require a formal evaluation process. They require paying attention to what's already happening. The pattern is almost always there if you look for it, and it's almost always consistent: providers who communicate well do it every time, and providers who don't do it inconsistently at best.
Understanding Your Own Technology Shouldn't Require a Translator
The technical work is the baseline. Any IT company worth hiring can fix the problem. What separates the ones worth keeping is what happens after the fix: whether your team understands what changed, feels comfortable calling next time, and trusts that the relationship is working for them rather than over their heads.
That gap between technically capable and genuinely communicative is where most IT relationships slowly fall apart. Not dramatically. Not with a single bad interaction. Just a pattern of nodding along, of not quite understanding, of deciding it's easier to work around the problem than explain it again to someone who'll respond in a language you don't speak. By the time the relationship feels broken, it's been breaking for months.
Mann IT is based in Ann Arbor and works with Michigan small businesses, nonprofits, and local organizations that want IT support that actually feels like support. Plain-English communication isn't something we add on top of technical service. It's how we define it. Every interaction is an opportunity to leave your team more informed and more capable than before they called, and that standard applies to everyone on our team, not just the ones who happen to be good at explaining things.
If your current IT relationship has started to feel more like a language barrier than a partnership, that should be a red flag worth looking at more closely. Get in touch with Mann IT for a conversation about what a different kind of IT support looks like.
Key Takeaways
- Geek speak in IT support isn't always intentional, but it's consistently costly. Most IT hiring and training focuses on technical skills and lightly on communication, so technically capable people end up in client-facing roles without the skill those roles require most.
- When your team can't understand what their IT company is telling them, they stop asking for help, stop reporting problems early, and start working around issues instead of solving them. Those workarounds are costs that never appear on any IT invoice.
- Poor IT communication is a security problem. Employees who dread calling IT don't report suspicious emails promptly. The difference between a reported phishing attempt and an ignored one is often whether the last IT interaction felt worth having.
- Good IT communication feels consistent: every technician, every interaction, every ticket closure comes with a plain-language explanation of what happened and what to watch for. That's a hiring and culture decision, not a personality lottery.
- The signs that your IT company speaks your language: tickets come with explanations, updates are proactive rather than reactive, your team feels more capable after interactions, and straightforward questions get straight answers.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How do I know if poor IT communication is actually affecting my business?
Ask your team directly: do they feel confident calling IT when something goes wrong? Do they understand what happened after a ticket closes? Are they working around recurring issues instead of reporting them? If the answers point toward avoidance, you're already paying the cost. It just doesn't show up on any invoice.
2. Can I ask my current IT provider to communicate differently?
Yes, and it's worth doing directly and specifically. Tell them what you need: plain-language explanations when tickets close, proactive updates during open issues, and responses your team can act on without a follow-up question. A provider who takes that feedback seriously and adjusts is worth keeping. One who doesn't is showing you something important about how they'll handle feedback going forward.
3. Is plain-English communication something I should evaluate before signing with a new IT company?
Absolutely. Ask them to explain something technical during the sales conversation and watch how they do it. Ask what happens when a ticket closes. Ask to speak with a current client and specifically ask that client whether they understand what their IT provider tells them. The answers will tell you more than any proposal or service catalog.
