You’ve got your standard procedures on one hand, and customer needs on the other. Lean too far one way and you might upset a customer; go too far the other way and you might mess with the processes that keep your business ticking.
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Once in a while, a project comes along that’s a little different from the others. It might not be the kind of thing you’ll base your memoirs on, but it sticks with you. For me, this happened when a big customer with a global footprint wanted something very specific—extra security layer against flooding attacks while still using their bare-metal servers. It wasn’t that solutions for flood protection didn’t exist; rather, the customer’s unique way of deploying IP blocks made our standard options unfeasible. This wasn’t an everyday request, and certainly wasn’t a chapter from the ‘how to’ manual of our business.
I was sitting at my desk wondering how to navigate this. It’s a challenge we all face, regardless of what our job title is or how long we’ve been in the industry. You’ve got your standard procedures on one hand, and customer needs on the other. Lean too far one way and you might upset a customer; go too far the other way and you might mess with the processes that keep your business ticking. Navigating this balance reminded me of the delicate dance between Customer Lifetime Value and the Cost to Serve.
This customer presented us with an atypical requirement. While our bare-metal servers already had robust security measures in place, the customer’s unique workload demands necessitated an additional layer of protection against flooding attacks. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill security concerns; they’re the kind that can catch you off guard unless you’re well-prepared. Recognizing the intricacies involved, the customer sought our specialized expertise to address this challenge.
This is where ‘custom-built solution’ fits in. I couldn’t solve this on my own, so I got in touch with people in the company who could help — engineers, our network security team, and product managers. Recognizing the complexity and importance of the task, subject matter experts from our backend teams even flew to the customer’s city. We spent a week on-site, collaborating closely with the customer to tailor our solution. We teamed up to figure out something that would work for this customer without throwing our usual way of doing things into chaos.
Figuring out the details wasn’t a walk in the park. It was a tug of war between what the customer wanted and what we could actually do without upending our core business rules. After some back and forth, and yes, a few longer-than-usual meetings, we found a middle ground—a special arrangement that gave the customer what they needed without breaking our own rules.
In hindsight, this project was a good reminder of the balancing act we sometimes have to do. It’s not an earth-shattering revelation, but it did put into perspective the idea of flexibility in the face of unique customer needs. Those customer management theories and sales trainings don’t prepare you for everything, but they do hint at the need for balance and judgement, even if they don’t spell it out for these rare occasions.
So that’s it. It wasn’t a seismic shift in how I see the world or business, but it was a useful exercise in striking a balance between what a customer needs and what we can offer. Sometimes, that’s all there is to it—just another day at the office, but with a bit more juggling than usual.