Playing for the Same Team

We are on your team. I never explicitly say this to people, but it is definitely the attitude I take with my customers. As an Account Manager at ZL, I have a number of customers who are all quite unique. These companies range in size from tens to tens of thousands of employees, and they all have their distinct ways of using ZL’s Unified Archive®. In my years here, I have also become quite familiar with each of these companies’ equally unique communication styles. I talk to some of my contacts just about every day, then there are ones I have weekly or quarterly calls with; I chalk this up to some people wanting as much assistance as possible, and some people just being content with what they have.

Getting back to this team theme I mentioned earlier, I would like to focus in on that aspect with one customer in particular. I had them pegged for preferring that last communication bucket; whenever I checked in, their Chief Compliance Officer would tell me how great things were going and how they did not have any complaints. I would tell him about any new features that might be coming down the line if he was interested, but we would essentially end up giving each other a verbal thumbs up and carried on until next time.

Well, at a certain point last year, there ended up being no “next time.” Over the summer, I got a surprising call from the President of this several thousand-seat bank. My main business side contact, this easy-to-please CCO, had left the company… and very abruptly, at that. In retrospect, this exit may or may not have had something to do with FINRA coming in for an audit in the early fall. After this compliance officer’s exit, the bank quickly realized how little reviewing had been done over the past several years. Needless to say, without anyone on their end really knowing our system well, they were in desperate need of assistance to prevent the proverbial fan from being covered in proverbial… um, mess.

So, there was a crisis on the horizon, not due to product functionality, but rather because of past user ineptitude. That’s is where we come in!  We are on your team. The bank brought in new people to catch back up on the review process, so we had to get them trained and trained well to be extra efficient. We performed our own audit of their system and provided numerous suggestions and ways they could optimize their workflow and system. Even the reviewable users needed adjustment and resynching. I worked closely with the bank’s management, counsel, compliance, and IT departments to make sure they would be prepared.

vLong story short, they passed their audit with flying colors. We have since worked with them to help advise on how they should set up their compliance review process, as well as suggesting how their department can coordinate with us and with their own IT to best accomplish what they need to.  Our next plan will be taking them to our cloud offering so that we can optimize their ZL environment further.

I love this example of how we put ourselves in the same boat as the customer, to either sink or swim. Both parties are invested in the outcome. We work together to ensure that we swim to overcome that first obstacle, but also remaining a team and working as partners over time to further optimize what we are both trying to accomplish. The stories like this are what make my job incredibly fulfilling, and realize that there can be a great, beneficial and mutual relationship between provider and customer.

So, let’s hear it… go team!

account management customer relations strategy ZL Team

When I’m not immersed in the technical sophistication of ZL’s software or answering the needs of my venerable customers, you can probably find me watching one of my favorite sports teams. I may be a transplant to this crazy hotbed of cutting-edge technology we call Silicon Valley, but I will always root for my Braves and Falcons; hopefully, that will remind me to keep my southern charm as well! I’m not afraid to laugh and smile like I mean it, especially if there’s a nice glass of wine in my hand and friends to share it with. Suffice it to say that my other interests are slightly nerdy: I simply can’t decide if I would rather reference Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones here. As a tiebreaker, I guess I will just sign off by saying, “may the force be with us.”