BRANDING IS A TRIBUTE, NOT A VERB.
BRANDING IS A TRIBUTE, NOT A VERB.
I am obsessed with brand. Not the brand that most people think of when they think brand - the colors, logo, advertising, or promotional characteristics of a company - but the actual brand experience. It’s the unique way in which you engage with a customer. How you sell, service and support is just as, if not more quite frankly, important than what you offer. Branding is typically considered a “marketing thing.” However, branding and the positioning of a company are far greater than any one campaign – branding is the foundational strategy that drives every customer engagement, whether it's sales, marketing, product, services and support.
BRANDING IS HOW AS MUCH AS WHAT.
The answer lies in how accurately a company comes to terms with what they sell versus how they sell it. Like all companies, Imprivata sells two products: our software (products) and the process, or experience, that a customer goes through to buy, deploy and use our products. And our products don’t stand alone; they combine with an overall experience designed to influence a customer’s decision to purchase, repurchase and recommend. If we get an A on the product and an F on the process, we’re a C player at best and simply won’t survive this competitive market. The Imprivata brand depends on the how as much as the what. And each of the brand attributes must be spectacular, signature, and sustainable.
ONE EXPERIENCE AT A TIME.
It all starts with a simple belief: every customer experience counts. With over 900 global hospitals serving more than 1.5 million care providers, we’ve got a great customer base. While Imprivata has had its share of raving fans and less than ecstatic customers, the good news is the raving fans outweigh the bunch – just check out our current KLAS rating (user sign on required). However, the Imprivata team is committed to making every customer experience signature and spectacular. And when this experience is less than stellar, we rally inside and focus on turning it around. This past Friday we had a customer experience at risk of going from bad to awful. The team worked late into the evening Friday and their weekend to solve a significant customer issue. Here’s the customer (a major health system in the Pacific Northwest) in their own (unabridged) words:
“I don’t even have the words to express how grateful I am to your company, and your teams of hard working service folks. I tried to add our OVA to the enterprise on Friday, and got an error about Sync issues, so I opened a ticket and was advised to force a reset/sync on the enterprise to clear the error. When I tried to run the reset/sync it all but crippled the database and the appliance would not come back online at all. It was a worst case scenario. I called support and spoke with Jeong who got on the phone with me and worked on the problem with me until about 4:45pm PST when he informed me as graciously as he could “I hate to mention this, but you are a standard support customer and standard support ends at 7:00pm EST and we’re 45 minutes beyond that. I’ll help you, but I need to go home first, so I’ll call you in 45 minutes. He called me from home, while eating a granola bar for dinner as he had no time to eat a decent meal, and got two other engineers on the phone with us and connected to remote support sessions. We had to have the system back up and running, and we were into weekend late night hours. Restaging the appliance was not an option as our backup was over a week old and would have lost hundreds of new physician registrations. Those three folks basically as a charitable donation worked with me to get the database functioning and the appliance back online.
People work long weeks… and look forward to that moment on Friday when the bell rings and your weekend begins. 3 (Highly technically competent) Imprivata employees decided my self-induced problem was important enough to push their weekend out another 4-5 hours. When our organization is trying to “Prioritize” their technology efforts and decide what’s important for their upcoming budget years it’s a no brainer to me. You guys are #1 in my book.”
Great customer experiences like these define and shape the Imprivata brand every day. Let us know how we're doing – tell us about your Imprivata experience.