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🎙 Welcome to Rarified Air: Stories of Inspired Service, a podcast that takes you on a journey into the DNA of InterSystems. I will be your guide as we explore how our unparalleled commitment to customer service fuels limitless human potential.
🤝 Join us as we dive into the culture of InterSystems and share the stories of the people who make it all possible - our customers, partners, and employees. From helping healthcare providers improve patient outcomes to powering the world’s most important institutions, we’ll show you how our dedication to customer service excellence is in rarified air.
Welcome to Rarefied Air, stories of inspired service. In this episode, John Paladino shares advice for startups on how to master customer service. He'll share his top four criteria for hiring the right people. If you have a busy day today, no worries because we packed all of this great advice into less than 5 minutes. Here's John.
John Paladino:If you're a startup, my recommendation, I actually have a few recommendations, would be, you know, always always be customer focused. And I say that because I run IT here. So I work with all the vendors, all the technology stack that you can imagine, and they're all different. Some are really customer centric and some aren't. What I want is a partnership, and by partnership, I mean, when things go wrong, work together to get it resolved.
John Paladino:But also, work proactively to make sure things don't go wrong. Inevitably, they do. But if you're working together in those two points, you have a good partnership. What customers want is a good partner. No matter what type of product you're selling, software or anything else.
John Paladino:That's number 1. Number 2, be really, really picky in who you hire. We have a our philosophy in this is, if we put somebody in front of a customer, we want the customer to say, wow, that's really a special person. To find those special people, and to recruit them, and hire them, it takes a lot of work. Hiring people is my top priority, always has been.
John Paladino:My criteria for hiring top people, I have 4 criteria. 1st is, they have to be really smart, very high degree of aptitude. Secondly, a high degree of initiative. I don't want people that wait around to be told what they should be doing. And if they have initiative and they make a mistake, I support them.
John Paladino:Put the risk on me, not them. The third thing is passion. Now I know that's subjective, but I want people who have energy, they're excited about something in life. It could be a hobby. It could be church.
John Paladino:It could be a school thing. It could be a sport. I want people who wake up in the morning, and they're just excited to do something. And the 4th thing is professionalism. And I have a very specific definition.
John Paladino:If I put somebody in front of a customer, I want to have confidence that in their heart, they really wanna help the customer. But they're also wise enough to understand what the customer needs, which is often different than what the customer wants. So those are the 4 criteria. Now if they have experience, if they have degrees, if they speak multiple languages, if they volunteer a lot, all those things are great. It's kind of the icing on the cake, but those four things are the cake.
John Paladino:My additional advice is don't worry about your competition. We always think, and I'm sure other people in startups think, the competition is 9 feet tall, and they have a baseball bat, and they can beat you every single day, and that's just not the case. There's so many ways you can differentiate yourself, and the high touch support that we deliver is the way that we differentiate ourselves. It helps our customers be successful, which is our goal. And it's not just support, it's everybody in the company steps up to help customers be successful.
John Paladino:So don't worry about the competition. You're always going to have competition. They're always going to be doing something different. Find your niche, whether it's a product or service or combination of both, find your identity and leverage it. Customers will buy from you for that reason.
Female VO:Thanks for listening today. If you have any questions or wanna hear from a specific guest, email us anytime at inspiredservice@intersystems.com . And when you're ready to unlock the potential of your data and experience the transformative power of support done differently, go to intersystems.com.