What It Means to Own a Customer

Early in my time at Zoomin I was handed responsibility for leading development for some of our largest customers. These were enormous organizations, the kind whose annual figures run into the billions, and they expected a professionalism and a respect equal to the scale of what they were trusting us with.

It is easy to underestimate what a documentation portal means to a company like that. For many of them the portal was one of the chief drivers of sales. Good documentation lets a customer adopt the product without hiring a room full of implementation experts, and so they want to use it. Bad documentation quietly kills the deal before anyone even initiated any sort of discussion. "Owning" one of these customers, then, was never a title. It was a promise to be there when they needed me, whatever the hour.

One of those nights came right after ServiceNow's great rebrand. They had just migrated from the legacy portal to the new Node and React framework, and a feature broke in a way none of the testing environments had shown. I began debugging near 11 PM. I traced what had gone wrong and carried it through an expedited release that finally closed around 2:30 AM. It was wearying work, but the alternative, a flagship customer left broken until business hours, was not something I was willing to allow.

Another time it was Automation Anywhere. After their own migration to the new Node and React framework, they found a severe bug in the server-side rendering, the kind of fault that shakes a customer's faith in the whole platform. It became a genuine matter of trust. I was put in charge of the SSR fix. Mending it quickly mattered, but I cared just as much that it could never happen twice, so I made sure we had solid test coverage around it, enough to catch a regression long before any customer would.

That is the part I am proudest of. A few months after the trust had been restored, Automation Anywhere did not merely renew their contract. They signed on for several years, and went on to endorse us and recommend us at event after event. Knowing that some of this grew out of my own efforts, after so rough a patch, made me happier and prouder than I can easily say.

Underneath the hours and the urgency there is a smaller principle I keep coming back to, that how you handle the little things is how you will handle the large ones. Jesus puts it as plainly as it can be put:

One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much.
Luke 16:10

I will be honest: the work took a great deal out of me, in mind and in body. Urgency and a customer's trust sat at the front of my thoughts always, and that weight is real. But diligence is something I hold to, and I held to it through all of it. When you treat a customer's trust as though it were your own, they feel it, the same way a good hour beside a car once closed a sale back when I sold them. The stakes were higher and the hours far worse, but the principle had not changed at all.