An executive we had been courting for a few months approached me at InterSystems Global Summit. It’s our annual meetup of customers from around the world and an exciting gathering of developers, industry leaders, and visionaries. We were talking because he had heard our promise: we do support differently.
Business leaders make an investment when choosing a technology partner, trusting that partner with the execution of their long-term strategy. We earn that trust by placing customer satisfaction and a standard of excellence at the core of our company.
When working with a substantial healthcare organization, for example, IRIS for Health interoperates with multiple databases, multiple API standards, and multiple teams. Getting the final product deployed means we need to see what they don’t see, fix what needs fixing, and anticipate their needs.
“Wow, you guys really are different! I’ve never seen such loyal customers in my life.”
Creating a “WOW!” customer experience is part of our investment in a long-term partnership with every customer. After speaking with many of our customers at the Global Summit, the executive told me: “Wow, you guys really are different! I’ve never seen such loyal customers in my life.”
So, how do we create such loyalty?
I believe it comes back to three core lessons from our customer experience at InterSystems:
If you’ve ever owned a relationship with a vendor, you might have experienced the “Round Robin,” getting a new account representative every year or so, making communication confusing and clunky. Or maybe you only hear from your account representative when it’s time for a contract renewal.
Organizations like this operate with vendor-centric behavior. It’s one of the surefire ways to lose customer trust and damage loyalty. Customers should be rewarded for being a partner by providing personal support instead of just being another transaction.
At InterSystems, our account managers are rarely re-assigned. They are trained to engage regularly with customers and build partnerships that can serve the client organization not just today, but for years to come. Having that familiar face makes our customer interactions seamless. We proactively identify issues and connect them with technical resources, especially our sales engineers.
Quantitative feedback is important, but not holistic. Our data dashboards tell us a lot about our internal efficiency, but very little about the precise moments of “WOW” with our customers.
“Our staff is empowered to spend as much time as necessary working with you.”
We rely heavily on the written feedback provided by our customers. Their feedback guides our product roadmap and our view on whether we’ve been successful.
The way we ensure our customers are satisfied is summarized in The Rules We Live By: “Our staff is empowered to spend as much time as necessary working with you.” All our customers, big and small, are truly looked after, not just marked “closed” in our ticketing system.
No customer is more than one step away – quite literally – from an InterSystems engineer. It’s our policy to answer the phone within 3 rings, and the person answering the phone is an engineer that can get into the weeds of your issue right then and there. No waiting on hold, no call-backs, no back-and-forth email threads: it’s real help from an expert 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Our product success team sits in the same office areas as our software engineers, sales engineers, and quality teams. We make time available for customer support staff and product teams to learn, particularly from each other, sharing the details of complex problem investigations, which leads to better products and faster resolution time for our customers.
These commitments are core to our belief at InterSystems that customer support is not a cost center, but a competitive advantage. We see the proof in our customer loyalty.
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