Customers are our best sales people

Last month I was visiting with a customer in California, and he told me how much of a pleasure it is to work with Zerowait. We were having dinner at a very nice restaurant, and the customer went on to tell me that he knew he was not our largest customer, but he felt that he was always given priority service and support whenever he called us about a service issue or about an upgrade. He wanted to tell me how much he appreciated the efforts we put into servicing his account. As the dinner went on he wanted to know where he fit into our account structure. I told him that many of our accounts are Fortune 100 accounts and that several of our accounts are in the 6 figure a year range, and indeed he was a smaller account for Zerowait. I explained that it is just as important to have long term customers as big customers, and we really appreciate his telling his friends and system administrator peers about our company. Most of our business growth has been through referral and recommendation and this organic growth has been very good for us.

As the evening went on he wanted to know how we developed our expanding NetApp monitoring, maintenance and management services. I told him that most of the ideas for the monitoring and maintenance service came from our customers, and that one of our semiconductor customers actually helped us to formalize our services and come up with program names so they would smoothly fall into the customer’s capital and operational budgets. The management programs we developed are based on the needs of a variety of customers who wanted us to manage their upgrades and systems at remote sites. Managing data migrations has become a very big aspect of our service business, and it is growing because people know we do it well.

As dinner wound down he wanted me to make certain that I thanked our engineers when I returned to our offices for all of the help they had provided him. He told me that with Zerowait support, storage is not a problem and the costs of storage growth are quite reasonable. He also told me that he had been talking to a friend of his and they were going to request a quote from us soon. Sure enough the next day my office had a Request for Quote from his friend which we bid on.

Customers really are our best salespeople, and we really appreciate their help!