Deltek’s Commitment to Customer Service: Keeping Customers at the Heart of What We Do

Interview with Brian Daniell, Chief Customer Officer, Deltek

With the advent of cloud technology, it becomes even more critical to drive hyper-focus on what's most important, our customers. That’s why every year we celebrate Customer Service Week by thanking our Deltek Project Nation customers. We also use this week to recognize our award-winning customer support organization by thanking the hundreds of global support analysts, consultants, customer success managers, operational experts and team leaders for their dedication to always putting customers first.

While Customer Service Week may only be one week out of the year, we're constantly reminded that our customers deserve modernized interactions and innovative ways to support their business and solutions to complex challenges.

We recently sat down with Chief Customer Officer, Brian Daniell, to hear about his perspective on the technology industry, the importance of building a culture of commitment to customer success and his passionate team behind the scenes.

Why is Deltek so committed to customer service?

We understand that customer service is a day-in and day-out journey that is an ongoing, persevering and compassionate activity. This culture shapes the whole attitude of our company, and over time that will lead to different decisions and long-term outcomes. At Deltek, we continuously need to focus on what we can do next and how we can improve the experience for our customers.

A big part of our learning comes from customer feedback and Deltek surveys. These vehicles capture what is important to Deltek Project Nation and allow our teams to evolve our solutions to meet their needs better.

Our customers are at the heart of everything we do and have been since the beginning. And since there is no shortage of technology solutions, I genuinely believe that focusing on the customer experience is what sets us apart.

What is it about Deltek’s employee culture that helps contribute to our great customer service culture?

You can't have a great customer experience without having a great employee experience. We find that these two go hand in hand in providing an outstanding customer service. We are fortunate at Deltek to have a tremendous employee culture with highly engaged employees. This starts from the moment we recruit. We look to find team members that have the customer-first mindset and are willing to collaborate to solve problems. We then use our award-winning employee onboarding program to enable our employees to adopt the customer-led culture here at Deltek.

Once we have ensured that our employees have a great experience and embrace our culture, it's time to start focusing on the customer experience. From there, we continually optimize the customer journey including our communication strategies, customer on boarding programs, support channels, and service offerings to build seamless and successful customer partnerships.

As you look forward to next year, how do you plan on evolving Deltek’s Customer Support in 2023?

Since the rise of the internet, social media, and cloud computing, customer behavior has changed dramatically. Customers today expect their relationship with brands to go beyond the use value of their products.

For 2023, one of Deltek's primary focuses will be enhancing our customer's digital experience, to create a more simplified and sustained relationship with our products and brand.

In an effort to address all our customer needs, we have developed many informative resource portals to support them along their journey. However, our customer feedback loop has uncovered unintended challenges—the vast amount of available information can be hard to find. Therefore, over the course of the next year we will be focused on pulling together a more seamless online experience for our customers.

In what ways is Deltek leveraging innovative technology to enhance the customer service experience?

To personalize customer experiences at the scale and depth necessary and answer our customer needs, we will be infusing artificial intelligence (AI) into our support channels to identify customers better and provide consistent high-level support. Additionally, we plan to integrate more of our learning content directly into our products to make it easier to access. Knowing our customers want to learn on their terms, anytime and anywhere, we hope that the advent of these technologies will help speed up all interactions and accelerate our customers time to value. 

Furthermore, we are looking at improving the complete online experience by streamlining menus and the choices for a more intuitive and modern experience.

While we are still in the early stages of research, we do anticipate upgrading our technology in the next year or two, not only for our customers but for our employees, who are on the other end of helping our customers. Investing in our tools and technology will ensure that we continue to drive a better employee and customer experience.

J.D. Power recently recognized Deltek for “Certified Technology Service & Support." What does that achievement mean to you and your organization?

It's great to receive the award, particularly from a prestigious organization like J.D. Power, but for us, it's really about the journey. Our team has learned a tremendous amount on the pursuit of these awards. We go through a pretty extensive process where J.D. Power measures Deltek against 200 different criteria for industry best practices.

Ultimately, we are scored on these criteria and receive a comprehensive report that tells us where the industry is moving and how our processes measure up. And each year, that continues to evolve, which is why we continue to benchmark ourselves and our support services against the industry.

The criteria for the award was more challenging this year than in prior years, so while we were excited, we know we will need to continue to improve.

What are you looking forward to most at our upcoming customer conference, Deltek ProjectCon? And is there anything specific our customers will learn about at this year's event?

Deltek ProjectCon is the largest opportunity for us as an organization to interact with our customers. I can't tell you how many customer meetings or simple impromptu conversations we can have with customers that we wouldn't have engaged in if we weren’t together in person. So from that perspective, we'll have hundreds of #TeamDeltek members there that will have the opportunity to engage and learn from our customers.

Along with some exciting announcements, it is an excellent opportunity to hear about all the great things happening with our products, services, and support. I look forward to giving a sneak preview into what the future will look like.

We’ve covered a lot as it relates to the award-winning customer service Deltek provides. So, if you had just one piece of advice to give to new customers, what would it be?

If I could only pick one thing, I would have to highlight the ongoing Customer Town Hall webinars. Each quarter our customers have the chance to learn what's happening from a product perspective and how our services continue to evolve. And it's an excellent opportunity to engage virtually with our team of experts throughout the year and stay up to date on everything that impacts the customer experience.