What does putting the customer first amidst a rapidly growing team look like for Railnova?

New Department, same goal: the customer comes first!

Some of you were excited with us when we announced Karin vander Have’s new position as Professional Services department lead. To refresh your memory, you can read the article here: https://bit.ly/karin-team-lead. At the time, we didn’t go much into detail about what exactly this new department would do and how it would fit into the Railnova dynamic. We thought it was worth going into more detail on what “customer first” means for us.

As Railnova is growing away from the start-up mode and embracing the definition of a scale-up, the need to have a unified effort toward customer care has become more apparent. To this end, we have decided to unify three teams — Customer Success, Train Interface Engineering, and Railster Projects — under one umbrella.

In short, the Professional Services department’s mission will be to help customers make the best use of the Railnova solution. We are taking our customer-first ideology to the next level.

Three became one, but the customer stays first!

The quality of a company can be measured by the place customer support has in its organisation,
Karin vander Have

We took three teams that intimately know our customers and different aspects of their needs and brought them together.

The Train Interface Engineering (TIE) is in direct contact with our customers. They have first-hand knowledge of the assets we are equipping and have a unique opportunity to see new pain points and address them.

The Railster Project team has intimate knowledge of our customers’ needs and wants. Their main purpose is to accommodate our customers’ solutions to our customers’ specificities.

As it stands, the Customer Success team already worked closely with both the TIE and Railster Project teams. Housing the teams under one leadership will help them benefit from the synergy with each other.

Stronger together

This grouping will enable delivering projects faster. It will also help with customer communication, and in conjunction with the SAM team, uncover value faster.

The Railster IoT Engineering Team configures the Railster with embedded edge algorithms, python apps, FPGA codecs,… to ensure data captivation on railway sub-components.

The Train Electrical Integration Team performs the safety analysis and electrical design that allow our customers to install the devices during routine maintenance.

The Customer Success Team onboards our customers, helps them create diagnostic rules and transform their maintenance workflows.

The Data Science Team, working on customer data, detects failure patterns and crafts new alerts and diagnostic reports based on PCA, machine learning, as well as expert rules.

The Customer Success team will benefit from the technical expertise of the TIE and Railster Projects teams. Together, the Professional Services department will be responsible for service, consulting, project execution, and product adoption.

What does “customer first” really mean?

At Railnova, we deeply believe in putting our customer’s needs at the centre of what we do and how we operate. To understand how serious we have always been about this, read Karin’s 2017 blog post here: https://bit.ly/railnova-blog. The general mandate for all our teams is to put the customer first. Furthermore, we constantly put ourselves in our customers’ shoes and believe in advocating for them.

In order to effectively champion our customer’s goals and create a true partnership with them, we need to develop a relationship first. The way we do this is by getting to know each other. We actively identify pain points for our customers so we can find ways that our solution will be helpful and optimal for them.

Each customer is different, they have non-identical needs that we need to address. We need to make sure we spend enough time getting to know them so we can supply the best solution for them. Having three key aspects to our solution under one team will help us have better and faster answers.

Ultimately, customer satisfaction is all about how customers feel about your company. We want our customers to feel they are solving their pain points and reaching their goals through our solutions.