The 3 Simple Truths of Achieving Customer Satisfaction Nirvana

Customer satisfaction is one of the underpinnings of an exceptional relationship, and at Delphix, customer success is a cultural mindset that is woven into the fabric of everything we do. In a digital world where every company is a data company, the notion of “customer service” has never been more important or difficult to manage.

Many Fortune 50 companies rely on Delphix to deliver data across their businesses to boost innovation, ensure compliance with data privacy laws, and thrive in today’s digital economy. Within these enterprise companies, not only is the technology complex, but so is the make of the various data teams:  from database administrators, developers, testers, security admins to the VP of AppDev and CIOs. Not to mention, these individuals and teams have varying levels of expertise and come from different backgrounds and have often seemingly oppositional business objectives they are trying to achieve.

To best serve customers, the Delphix customer success team, spanning 3 continents, are not only technical experts, but they’re true ambassadors of Delphix who have deep knowledge of the complexities of the data landscape. So what’s the secret to our success? Turns out it’s simply the blocking and tackling, nothing sexy or magical. Here are the key factors that have contributed to our success.

1. Innovation is in Our DNA

Customer success is deeply rooted in data and analytics. From workforce planning to talent development and investment strategies, data is at the core of everything we do. Beginning with the organizational leaders, we constantly explore ways to help drive innovation for our customers. We recently instituted a weekly company-wide customer forum, where leaders across the company review customer input on process, product, and people, so we can replicate best practices and continually optimize the experience by driving improvements into our operations and product.

2. We are Technologists & Data Experts

Our culture is built on our commitment to excellence on every internal and external interaction, and our mission, vision, values, newsletters, training, recruitment and rewards program all reflect and promote our customer service philosophy. We’ve strategically hired the most seasoned engineers across the world, so that the sun never sets on Delphix Support and there is no drop in the quality of service from one region to another. No matter the time of day, we are on deck to provide assistance, both in a timely manner and with extreme care and quality.  We not only recruit engineers that have domain expertise, we search for people that understand the DataOps ecosystem and can serve as sherpas to our clients. We approach customer support as more than just a transactional function; we think beyond the fix and focus on the business outcomes.

Pictured left to right: Janet Anderson, David Markham, Julie Keith, Peter Majeed, Don Deal, Moe Nwankwo, Beth Fulton, Aoife O'Brien, Hamid Haidari, Will Rahim

Moreover, our management team has the depth, breadth and experience, whose primary job is to coach, guide and mentor their teams, so every individual can continue to improve and maintain and sustain the level of excellence customers have come to expect.

3. Our Company is Only as Extraordinary as Our People

“Take care of your employees and they’ll take care of your business,” says Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group. Our investment in developing our workforce has also had a lasting effect on the customer experience. Our employees have ample opportunities to grow and learn new skills to help them succeed in their current roles or position them for future roles within Delphix. For example, manager MBOs include employee growth and development elements and is tracked by the senior leadership team. Therefore, it’s no surprise that our employee retention is an industry-best 95 percent.

Measuring Customer Satisfaction

From an operational perspective, we’ve got a lot of sensors in place to monitor our interactions with customers at different stages of the problem lifecycle because we want to make sure we have a line of sight into our performance relative to customer expectations.

Using MaestroQA, we audit hundreds of customer interactions every month to ensure consistently superior delivery of service to our global clients. With thousands of customer support elements audited every year, we consistently have less than a 2 percent defect rate. From our customers’ perspective, this means we are likely to address their problems on the first try. But when we’re unable to solve complex issues on the first try, we look to properly set customer expectations and consistently meet the commitments we make to our customers during the case life cycle.

Our performance has also been validated by benchmarks conducted with industry groups, such as the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA). For customer satisfaction, we are considered a pacesetter with a rating of 4.7 out of 5 versus the industry rating at 4.4.

Likewise, I’m happy to report that we outperformed everyone else from a talent retention and management perspective with Delphix at 5 percent annual attrition rate versus the industry’s 15 percent annual attrition rate.

Bringing it All Together

Since 2016, we’ve added hundreds of customers and thousands of new contacts, and our product portfolio has grown tremendously. We now have more products to support with our extensible data source integration to empower the builders in today’s app-driven world.

While we’ve experienced a lot of change in terms of whom we support and what we support, the one constant has been the level of service we’re delivering to customers every single day. It’s not an accident, it’s not a fluke! It’s a lot of hard work and a laser focus on the blocking and tackling that ultimately drives repeatable success.

We know that you can’t successfully do business without these foundational building blocks of striving to always be customer advocates, hiring individuals who are committed to our core values and investing in our talent  - or at least not for long.

Interested in working at Delphix? Apply today. Visit our blog to hear more from staff across our offices in Redwood City, San Francisco, Atlanta, Boston, Colorado, UK, Germany, Tokyo, Singapore and São Paulo.