With a team of people spread over several countries we don’t all get together very often. Over the last weekend though we had a great excuse, as we gathered at a party to celebrate our 25 years in business. The photograph was taken early in the evening before things got too messy, as they have a tendency to when our team gets to party.
Adept Scientific 25th Anniversary Party November 2009
When we founded Adept Scientific back in 1984 we had the simple aim of helping scientists and engineers benefit from using personal computers. Back then the IBM PC was the number one personal computer and the Apple Macintosh had just been introduced. There were very few dedicated applications for scientists and engineers and most people did not have a PC on their desk. How things have changed: our daily work usually revolves round our use of personal computers whether they are desktops, laptops or netbooks. There are now many really good software and hardware packages to help us do things we would perhaps not have thought possible 25 years ago and we supply and support the best of them.
Over the last 25 years Adept Scientific has grown from a tiny two person company to one with four international offices serving customers all over the world. We never imagined that the business we started on our kitchen table many years ago would have grown to this. So a big thank you to our customers, to our suppliers and to the team here at Adept Scientific for helping us to make it happen.
Chris Rand of Business Marketing Online recently visited Adept Scientific’s UK office to interview Paul Bragg one of the founders of Adept Scientific. The discussion centred on how important good customer service is to the team at Adept Scientific. You can watch the video or read the inteview transcript below.
CR : How does Adept Scientific keep its customers so happy?
PB : We’ve always focused on being a specialist supplier of software and hardware for technical computing applications so that could be anything – from data acquisition to mathematics – but the key thing is, we always approach things from a consulting perspective to sell our products.
We get paid by selling products, but we have to teach people and transfer the knowledge about how the products work before customers buy because they might want to do something we can’t help them with. We’d rather they didn’t buy something that was wrong, and be certain that ours is the right solution for them, than buy the wrong product and end up dissatisfied as a result.
So, customer service, customer satisfaction – we want happy customers- that’s really important to us. Most of the people who work here have previously worked in engineering or science and they know what it’s like to be on the other end of buying things. It’s very important you make the right choice and so we want to make sure people always make the right choice.
CR :Does Adept Scientific have a typical customer?
PB : No, because we have such a huge range of customers, from large corporations who are buying all sorts of things, to individuals. We even have retired professors who buy software (mathematics software for example) because they enjoy the subject and want to play. We have a lot of student customers. It really varies a lot so there isn’t one typical customer.
In data acquisition obviously, it tends to be an organisation, a company that’s got a particular project and we’ll go along and talk about what they want to do, how many channels etc, and we’ll produce or suggest a solution for them and they might chose to use us. If they were looking for bibliographic reference management software then we sell them EndNote or Reference Manager, depending on how they want to handle their data.
CR : Adept Scientific’s support is legendary. Does this cost money?
PB : Typically no. Pre-sales we do a lot of support for people. We’d rather – it’s selfish in some ways on our part – but we’d rather do that support beforehand because, really, it costs us less money. If you’ve got the wrong solution and we’re struggling to fix it then nobody’s happy. We’re not happy because we’re going to have to spend a lot of time trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear and you’re not going to be happy because we sold you the wrong thing.
So we’d much rather have people talk to us first so that we provide them with the right solution and, yes, it does cost us money. But in this marketplace, it’s all part of supplying people. We think it is anyway – it’s probably the reason why we’re so successful and we’ve been here 25 years. A lot of companies have gone by the wayside. With us it’s not sell and forget, it’s not that sort of business – we’re looking for a long-term relationships with our customers.
CR : So why does the company invest so much in keeping customers happy?
PB : You’d think that would be the way that everybody would work, because long-term, if the customer’s not happy, they’re not going to buy from us again. We have been around for 25 years and we have some customers who maybe haven’t been with us that long but keep buying from us. I think that’s because of the sort of service we provide, and not always by the same person because we have different people doing different things in the company. Some people might be specialists in mathematics, some are specialists in software for quality control, chemistry – whatever it might be. We’re often doing a knowledge transfer, sharing knowledge actually, because the customers will know an awful lot about their particular area of expertise. We know an awful lot about the products that we sell and we have to marry that knowledge together so that we can make sure that what you want is going to work.
