Who’s On Phirst

At Phurnace, we take great pride in our customer service. Since day one, we have created processes and employed systems to help us reach our goal of 100% Customer Satisfaction. A world class product like Phurnace Deliver is only as good as our customers’ ability to implement our solution. To that end, we utilize Salesforce.com’s Customer Portal and provide our customers the ability to directly contact our engineers. We are so confident with our solution, that every single one of our customers has my mobile number.

To reach our goals of 100% Customer Satisfaction and sub-100 day ROI, we partner with our customers and don’t simply sell them software. Our customers drive our product road map and feature list. We have chosen that route because, simply put, it’s easy. After all, why throw darts at a wall of new features when we can simply ask our customers what they want?

To that end, I have found that two qualities in our customers leads to greater success and faster ROI: being communicative and having a desire to change.

Communicative: Simply put, we want our customers to tell us what’s they need. To help us answer any of their questions or to guide the future features, we have adopted an agile development model that allows us to shift priorities without risking deliverables. However, that model presupposes that our customers will let us know what is on their mind and what is truly important to them. If there is a request , our engineering staff is able to quickly produce hot fixes for our customers once they have been notified. It pains me considerably to hear from a customer “Oh, that’s been happening for months,” or “We ran across that in February.” Of course, once we are able to prove to our customers that we aren’t like other software companies and that we will actually fix our problems, that communication comes much more freely.

Desire to Change: Our product requires a shift in how customers think about managing their configurations and deployments. Instead of thinking linearly about the mechanism of change, we ask that our customers just think about the change itself. “Concentrate on the ‘what’, not the ‘how’” is what we like to say to them. For some of our customers’ team members this is difficult as it does require them to approach problems in a different manner. As with all change, you should only initiate change only when you have a clear path to a benefit. To this end, we continually work with our customers to assure that they are tracking to reach ROI in under 100 days. In fact, we have sent engineers to customer sites well after training to help move them closer to that ROI target, simply to make them a happy customer.

100% Customer Satisfaction and sub-100 day ROI are lofty goals. Yet, they are attainable if you partner with communicative customers with a desire to change.