Sep 24th, 2020
Best Practices
Whatever It Takes
Written by: Craig Vosper, Chief Delivery Officer
Today, I want to take our theme of differentiation and focus on what that means to me in my role at Clientek. I believe that one of our primary differentiators is our commitment to customer success, Whatever It Takes. While it is a catchy marketing slogan, it’s also a core value that has kept me here for over 20 years!
I first came to realize it’s importance when I was just starting out as a developer for Clientek; just 2 years out of my army days. One of my army buddies had come to me with the idea of building a website for his small business and I was excited for the chance to bring some business to my new company. Kirk Hoaglund (Clientek Founder & CEO) and I sat down to talk with them and by the end of the meeting Kirk told my buddy that we wouldn’t be doing the work. His reasoning: they didn’t have a good enough business case to warrant the cost of building the site.
Not long after that meeting, we were approached by a clinic to help review and recommend changes to their newly implemented automated phone system. Their nurses were experiencing lots of issues with the new system and these issues had significantly impacted their call times. Once we had learned enough to understand their goals, objectives, and current state, we recommended they scrap the whole system. Through our analysis we had found that their previous state had been meeting their goals all along.
A few years later, we were working on a large and complex mobile application. The customer had been having some message reliability issues and when we dug into the problem, we realized that our server-side architecture wasn’t as resilient as it needed to be. We determined that the most suitable way to move forward would be to bite the bullet and fix the issue. We brought in additional resources for a month, swallowed the additional costs, and fixed the architecture so that the system would truly meet their needs.
Over my 20+ years at Clientek there have been countless examples like the ones I’ve shared, but in each case, we chose project success over our own tactical advantage. We make decisions that ensure we deliver what we commit to. Time and time again I’ve seen Clientek do what was right for the customer instead of what would be beneficial to us.
This best practice of ours has been key in creating long term relationships with our customers and it makes me proud to be part of an organization that does right by them!