Q&A with Yann Guilain, Customer Care Director at Digimind

As Customer Care Director, my role is to make sure on a daily basis that the customer experience is a success. That’s to say,  I check that our customers can get satisfactory answers to any questions that they may be asking themselves.  We do this with our Helpdesk which deals with technical questions, with our training service which looks after the quality of our client training days and has this year put in place our Help and Training Center (support.digimind.com) and also with our new developments quality procedure.

Beyond these support and organisational tasks, I also play a role in making sure that our clients are satisfied with the way their Digimind platforms and configurations are operating.  This means working to continually improve the way we accompany our clients during the life of a project.  I strive to harmonise our roll-out procedures across the different international zones in which our service is used.  I also take a more hands-on role in projects whenever clients are confronted with more challenging questions.

And finally, as part of the Product Committee at Digimind, I listen to our clients' functional needs and I take part in our roadmap decisions.

It’s a varied, multi-faceted, global job that contains a single objective: fire up our inner engines to make sure that the Digimind customer experience is as good as it can possibly be.

2) What are the main challenges you face working with intelligence professionals every day?

To keep our clients happy we have to juggle different elements and challenges: response times, making good on our promises, the quality and tone of our replies, and creating added value in our training days and support centers.  And last but not least, we have to know how to deal with unsatisfied people and tense situations.  But then, difficult problems only get good solutions if we take the time to really actively listen to our clients and we then have the necessary tools to make it work.  Balancing these two sides means that we have record levels of resubscriptions every year.

3) You’ve been in this field for more than 10 years. What, in your opinion, are the best practices for making sure a project is successful?

I have so much to say on this point! If I could only keep one single  point, I’d have to say that the most important is “hunt down added value”.  What I mean by this is that you have to focus a maximum of effort into deliverables, CI watches, subjects, analysis that will bring added value to key decision makers.  Everything about the way we organise a CI project, all our efforts can then be focused on this objective, once it has been well-identified.  At the end of the day, there’s only one question that counts: “What’s it for?”

4) What strategies do you have for ensuring that customer centricity remains a core value for Digimind?

The first approach is to really listen to our clients and then to take decisions based on what they actually say.  Being able to listen to people is probably the most important quality in this line of work.  Client service requires a good dose of empathy.
The second key approach is to connect all the people in our company to our clients:  you have to make sure the right people with the right tools are constantly in touch with the methods, ways of working, feedback and opinions of our clients.
The third approach is to look upon client service as a selling point that sets us apart from our competitors.  We do this by sharing information about our clients internally, by training both our staff and our clients, and by good working practices for Digimind-client interaction.
And the last strategic approach is to maintain relationships based on trust, respect and loyalty so that our customers become life-long clients.