Walking in your customers shoes, literally

It’s one of those phrases that everyone has heard again and again, you might even have a poster of this phrase somewhere up at your office. But what it really means can be so different for many companies. At AppZen we take this phrase to heart and really do walk in our customer’s shoes, and it’s not a metaphor — we actually collect customer’s shoes.

It all starts with our companies culture and our values. Early on in the company, we set out to create 5 key values that help keep us focused when presented with difficult challenges. The first value that we have is “Customer Obsession” — every employee is focused on who our customer is, what drives value for them and how we can all help to make their experience better.

But let’s get back to the shoes. For our strategic customers, we end our QBR’s talking about our #1 value of customer obsession and what it really means to us as a company. We speak about our Cross Functional check-in calls, our customer immersion program for new hires and how we would like to really walk in their shoes. We ask for a pair of their shoes along with a photo and quote and encase them into a installation that goes into a conference room.

As various teams are working on solving customer problems, from engineering to marketing to support we have a constant reminder of who our customer is along with a little bit of style for the office. These displays make for great conversation starters and remind ourselves that our customers are not just logos, they are real people with real goals & struggles — we are here to partner with them and make them wildly successful.