Andrew Warner of Mixergy recently interviewed CS CEO/Co-Founder Michael Fitzpatrick. You can find the full interview here.
Michael and Andrew discuss the history of ConnectSolutions, from the acquisition of venture capitol money, the signing the company’s first client, the track to profitability, and the continuing growth of the company.
In the interview, Michael talks about ConnectSolutions commitment to “insane, passionate customer service” for our customers in enterprise and government. He also talks about the time commitment and sacrifice required of entrepreneurs, “every 3am phone call — we know about it.”
ConnectSolutions’ customer success over the past few years has been fueled by three key ingredients:
- No-limits Customer Service = From day one, our company culture has centered around extreme empathy for our customers, and the result is that everyone in the company has consistently demonstrated their willingness and motivation to do whatever it takes to make our customers and partners successful. Required reading around here is Jack Mitchell’s “Hug Your Customers,” and we draw lots of inspiration from other examples such as Zappos and others.
- Great Technology = Combining award-winning products from Adobe, with our own Engineering and Operations innovations, has provided organizations with an extremely reliable and scalable platform to support adoption and rapid growth. Reliable technology combined with passionate customer service is proving to be a deadly combination to our competition…
- Coffee…
That last bullet is what brought me to Starbucks this morning in Burlingame, CA, and resulted in a great reminder of how important exceptional customer service is for businesses of any size. I hadn’t been in that store for some time, and yet the manager said “Hello Michael.” No use of fancy CRM systems, just “WOW” customer service. Then, as I waited for my coffee to be brewed, I noticed this same manager quickly pulling all of the staff together in front of the line of waiting customers. Suddenly, they were all singing “Happy Birthday” to a man who appeared to be in his upper-80s, and all of the customers in the store jumped right-in with them. This man was almost in tears at the sound of 30 people singing to him. If that’s not “hugging” your customers, I don’t know what is.
ConnectSolutions Customers: expect a note from me looking for birthdays…
