Happy Customers
2.05.2007 - Mike Rustici
Getting on the federal government's GSA schedule is a pain in the neck. Luckily we have a great assistant in Jean to trek through all the rigamarole. Step #472 Part Q involves a thorough investigation of your company's background and success in working with clients. Part of this background check is a survey of existing clients conducted by Dun and Bradstreet's Open Ratings program. This survey seeks our clients' opinions on everything about our business from reliability and responsiveness to product quality and business relations. We're proud, but not surprised, that we earned a score of 96, putting us in the top tier of all evaluated companies. We know that we have very happy clients, but it's nice to have somebody else confirm and publicize it.
For us, customer service isn't about a 12-step quality improvement program, formal policies or sending out a monthly newsletter, it's more about just doing what's right. Our clients pay for and receive top of the line solutions. Along with those solutions comes top of the line service and support. We're a small company and maybe we're a bit old fashioned, but I believe that any of our customers should be able to pick up the phone and chat with Tim or I about whatever is on their mind and that we should do whatever it takes to ensure their satisfaction. The customer may not always be right, but the customer always deserves to be heard and have his problems addressed to the best of our abilities. D&B only surveyed 20 customers, but had they surveyed them all I'm confident our rating would remain high. Many would suggest that such an open service-oriented business model won't scale well and would provide a huge drain on valuable internal resources. So far that hasn't been the case, we currently have about 100 customers using our SCORM products. These products reach millions of learners and yet our support "burden" has remained minimal. I've been reflecting a bit on how we pull this off, how does such a small company exceptionally serve so many customers? The quick answer is that our products just work. We take a lot of pride in producing high quality software which doesn't need a lot of attention. We're tightly specialized and deeply knowledgeable so we can be very focused and exceptionally good at what we do. We also hire tremendous personnel, without them, we could never achieve all that we have.
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