Why Relationships Matter Most at Paperless Parts
As a physics major in college, I volunteered as a Learning Assistant for a lab that consisted of mostly non-physics majors. The lab was almost entirely student-run, so you can imagine the challenge there; convincing people to learn something they don’t love – especially when they don’t have to learn it.
Luckily, I loved physics and I was able to form close relationships with many of the students in the group. Eventually, the problems we were working on together became easier to solve and physics became something we all enjoyed (or at least hated a little bit less).
Relationships help to put meaning behind everything. That’s something I learned in that college lab, and it’s also something that I was reminded of on my first day at Paperless Parts.
One of our three core values here at Paperless Parts is Relationships Matter – and even without the large poster we have in our kitchen that says “Relationships Matter,” it’s evident in everything we do. From our frequent customer shop visits to our presence at manufacturing trade shows year round, we draw inspiration from our customers: many manufacturing businesses rely on word of mouth to grow, meaning their relationships with clients, partners, and peers are critical to create and maintain.
What does “customer success” look like?
In my role as a Customer Implementation Manager, I work with people every day. Unsurprisingly, the shops where everybody cares about each other – where people are communicating and collaborating and valuing one another’s opinions – those are the ones that are able to find the most success with our product.
Meg (left) with fellow Paperless Parts Customer Implementation and Customer Success Managers at a recent team outing.
Strong relationships impact your bottom line in so many ways. For example, those same shops that know their employees and customers inside and out also have a leg up: they know who they don’t want to work with. If they can’t support a process, they know why because they communicate well with their machinists. They can make quicker, smarter decisions that free up their time to focus on the work they’ll really deliver on. They also know how much an individual customer may be willing to pay for an expedite because they’ve had that conversation with them before.
A lasting impact
My favorite conversations are the ones with small, family-run shops who can really see an impact from manufacturing software. In those instances, there’s maybe 1-2 people quoting so staying on top of things, let alone scaling the business, is a really heavy burden. When I help shops set up an efficient, sustainable, and trainable quoting process in Paperless Parts, they’re able to win more work and become competitive. We’re seeing more and more customers take their first vacation in years, bring on new estimators, and retire earlier than planned.
It’s my mission to help close the technology gap in the manufacturing industry, and I think it all starts with helping people learn. Whether they’re learning the platform at the most basic or complex level, I feel so special to be that friendly face our customers can connect with, one that will never think something is a “dumb question.” We take onboarding so seriously and never force anyone into doing something a certain way. Technology can be scary, but we aren’t!
Although it’s been a while since I graduated, I’m continually reminded of the great value I found in teaching physics in college: successful learning can’t happen without the foundation of a strong relationship.
I couldn’t be more proud of the work that we do at Paperless Parts. If you’re interested in joining a team that works hard every day to improve lives, check out our Careers page today!
Want to start building your own strong relationships?
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Meg van Deventer is a Customer Success Manager at Paperless Parts. She joined the company with a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Florida State University, where she also minored in English and Math, and served as the Music Director of her acapella group. Meg’s favorite thing about her job at Paperless Parts is getting to work with smart people and help shops solve real problems every day. Meg resides with her boyfriend in the North End of Boston.