Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/942744
38 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2018 Our developers actually respond directly and ask for even more information or more details about what the customer might be thinking. It's very vibrant. One of the other cool things is, not all of the developers, but quite a decent number of them, more than 10%, actually tin- ker around with electronics themselves. They do designs themselves. That helps a bit too that they walk a mile in the shoes of the user. They're busy developing the tool most of the time, but quite a few of them are electronics hobbyists. Shaughnessy: So, tell me: How do you measure satisfaction? Jordan: Well, that's pretty simple and it's com- plex all at the same time. At the end of the day, it's measured by subscription renewals. It's actu- ally hard numbers. If people love the software and love what we're doing, they stay with us. They become loyal and they don't just stay with a version. There have been software packages that I have acquired in the past, personally, and I've worked for companies that bought them. They bought it and it functioned well enough. There were things about it that were maybe irritating here or there, but generally it worked pretty well, and there was no incentive or motivation to upgrade or to pay maintenance other than to get tech - nical support. A lot of companies have different philosophies and decision-mak- ing processes around this, but the truth is, the real proof in the pudding is if you do the right thing by the user and if you listen to them, you implement things that make their life better. It may not be done in the way they think is the best way. Either way, we have to advance the soft- ware. The user may have some small idea of an incremental improvement, but sometimes that triggers a whole re-evaluation of how some- thing works. Either way, we respond. Besides actual feedback verbally and with comments and word of mouth and getting new business because someone moved from one company to a new company and they recommended our tool over anything else cause that's what they love. Apart from those ways, the hard numbers are the renewals and the loyalty to subscrip- tion. Shaughnessy: What's the farthest you all have gone to accommodate a difficult customer? You know, in terms of technical or just on the admin side. Jordan: I remember hearing from Dr. David Warren, who's on our board of directors, and he was co-founder of the company with Nick Martin. Dr. Warren shared a story with me a few months ago about this time when he was at a trade show in Silicon Valley. This is back in the Protel days. A customer came in with an entourage, angry, red-faced, blaming Protel for a bug that caused him to produce tens of thousands of dollars' worth of scrapped boards. It cost him time and money and he was pretty upset and I don't think the fault was even with the software. If they were to dig into it, they could have found it was a user error. I've seen situations like this myself in technical support days in the past. I'd go through it with them and sure enough, it would turn out that they forgot to run the check again before they released their board. So, Dr. Warren ended up giving him three licenses. It probably was the fault of the customer, but to make sure the situation turned around and to keep this per- son loyal, we were willing to give him what he needed to expand his business in terms of licenses. That's the nice thing about software. Sometimes you can make those exceptions and it doesn't hurt too much to do it. On the other hand, just talking about sup- porting customers, there's a constant pull for us, and as a tool provider that largely caters to the mainstream, we're inclined to do things for large customers who have a very specific niche need. Then there's the enterprise busi-