Last updated at Wed, 26 Jul 2017 14:04:41 GMT
Greetings! As we launch our new community, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to start communicating with you through a regular blog conversation. I will use this forum to provide insight and useful information from inside our team. Let's start with introductions and then give you a look back at the evolution of the Rapid7 customer experience.
A little about me. I've been leading client-facing teams in the service industry for most of my career. My years spent in the “pick, pack, and ship” world formed my personal beliefs on supporting customers. A service business is fueled by people power, with a critical requirement to hire, coach, and retain highly motivated and talented people to beat the competition. So how does that translate in a software company? It's simple, use the same approach! Rapid7 has developed some of the most innovative security solutions in the world. Our customers love our products and we beat our competition every single day. It's our relationships and approach to service that creates happy and evangelistic customers.
About three years ago I joined Rapid7 with a simple and clear mission; create happy customers who are loyal to our products and services. We had just reached an important milestone; Bain Capital Ventures, inspired by our story, vision, and strength of leadership, made a significant investment in us. At that time, our technical support team was a small group of enthusiastic young people. With raw talent and full of heart, they went out of their way to help customers every way they could. The entire team was based out of our Boston office, in beautiful Copley Square (if you are ever in the area, we would love for you to stop by and meet us!).
Over the past few years we have expanded our team to Los Angeles and co-located with our core engineering group. We hired seasoned industry leaders to create structure and scale the organization. We continued to recruit more of the same smart, customer-centric engineers that have the “special support gene” and love what they do. We started surveying our customers to better understand and measure how we perform. That feedback has directly impacted our approach and expectations of ourselves. Thank you for always being candid with us! It's what makes our customers so special.
We also introduced account managers; the customer relationship leaders. We started this team with the mission that every customer would receive proactive communication from us to see how they're getting on and how we can best assist them. We wouldn't wait for them; we would create a plan, reach out, and make it happen. We also created a dedicated new accounts team that welcomes every new customer with information and tools needed to get them set up and headed in the right direction: a “customer concierge service” if you will. The response to our outreach has been incredibly positive and our relationships continue to strengthen. The result of this work is recognized with extraordinary retention rates year over year. Thank you.
This brings us to today! I am very excited to launch this first blog at "happy hour" and share information with you that I think you will find useful and interesting. I will continue to provide candid insight to what our client services team is all about by sharing our motivations and core principles. I will also give you the first look at new features, cool tips and tricks, success stories, regional events, and great webinars. Feel free to submit your stories and topic suggestions to me; I'd love your input. Please post your requests in the comments section and I'll add them to the mix!
Cheers!
