At Omni, our success is tied to that of our customers. This core belief shapes every decision we make — from company strategy to how we show up daily.
We work hard to deeply understand our customers: how they use data, their challenges, and how we can help them succeed. This applies to everyone at Omni — founders, engineers, marketers, sales, product, and support. Omnis are curious about data and solving problems, and about the people behind the screen.
One of the highlights of my experience at Omni has been the relationships we’ve built with customers. Early in my career when I joined Looker, the leader of the support org, Margaret Rosas, modeled this — forming human relationships with the people we supported. Yes, it makes doing business together smooth and enjoyable, but I’ve also found building these genuine connections to be personally rewarding and have stayed in touch with many of the people I met via support over the years.
This human approach has always been at the core of our strategy at Omni. We differentiate on customer experience because we know that when people who use our product are successful in their work, our work is more meaningful and likely to succeed in the long run.
In this post, I share how we partner with customers, including:
Meeting customers where they work
Getting our entire team involved
Addressing root problems and underlying needs
Three ways our customers support us
Providing detailed feedback
Helping us understand the “why” behind asks
Sharing their experience with others
“The speed and support we got from Omni was amazing and saved our team a lot of time and resources. The team was a big selling point for me. Everyone is incredibly knowledgeable, passionate, and eager to make us successful.” Dan Gaul, Chief Technical Officer at Digital Trends
How we support our customers #
1. Meet people where they work
We strive to meet people where they work. For some that’s email, but for many it’s chat apps like Slack or Teams. We build relationships with customers in shared messaging channels as early as the evaluation stage. This gives teams a real feel for what their experience will be like as a customer. It also creates a record of shared questions and information, so we can provide better ongoing support and improve our product. (We also get to enjoy a shared library of emojis, which has been an unexpectedly fun means of cultural exchange!)
I especially appreciate the efficiency of communication via chat. Messaging on Slack or Teams feels a lot more like talking to a coworker than a ticketing system does, and I’ve seen how this supports delightful interactions and better collaboration. Chat messages are natural and fast to write, whereas emails tend to be formal and take longer to compose. Our VP of Product Arielle can simply drop a quick message in a few customer channels when she needs beta testers. When a customer shares product feedback, I can share a link to the thread with our design team, or tag Arielle so she can learn more. I can ask follow-up questions and bounce ideas off of customers, loop in engineers as needed, and solve issues in real-time.
Our new head of support Jiro probably thought I was crazy when I first told him we have hundreds of channels with customers, partners, and folks trying out Omni. But he quickly saw the immense value in what we’re doing, and it’s been awesome seeing him make our customer experience even better.
“We just love the shared Slack channel for customer support. It feels really encouraging and collaborative, even when the answer is ‘We can’t do that yet, but here’s a workaround.’ We use a lot of platforms, but this level of support is unique to Omni.” Luke Ruth, Chief Product Officer at Fundrise
2. Get everyone involved
While we have dedicated product experts running support, they’re never the only ones taking care of customers. Our CEO Colin has been the number three contributor to our support efforts for many months now — I can’t think of a better example to show just how important customer experience is to every member of the team.
This dedication is not just top-down; our engineers care deeply about how the things they’ve built are being used. When customers have issues, engineers jump into Slack threads to understand what they need and troubleshoot live. This week at our all-company offsite, our engineers have a “Use The Product” Day, during which they’ll rotate through support shifts to better understand our customer experience.
“The Omni team was really responsive in Slack and completely onboard to help us debug issues or explain how to implement our ideas.” Jack Colsey, Analytics Manager at incident.io
3. Address the underlying need
Naturally, we answer a lot of one-off questions like, “How do I run this specific type of analysis?” or “How do I resolve this error?” But we also get to advise on broader data challenges, like finding the right tool or handling complex data structures.
Venturing a little beyond our own product to support customers allows us to scale our impact. If someone doesn’t have a data team, we can advise on what to look for in a first data hire. If they’re not ready to hire, we can introduce them to trusted consultants in our partner network who will help them lay the foundation of their data practice.
One of the most important traits I look for when hiring for my team, which spans pre-sales, post-sales, and support, is a love of teaching. Enablement is central to our customer experience; even in our sales process, our focus is on building and education. To be clear, we still help people with build-outs, accelerating migrations, etc., but when possible, our time is spent teaching people to build the things they want to use instead of delivering completed black-box solutions.
This is part of the reason that I don’t like using time-to-resolution as a support metric. I worry it incentivizes teams to close out conversations as soon as possible, rather than taking the time to fully understand and address the root problem. Of course, I care that we respond and find solutions for our customers quickly. But to make customers truly successful, the relationship and support has to be ongoing, and we’ll never really be “done.”
How our customers support us #
1. Constant opportunities for feedback
Customer feedback is formative to our product development process. We have a low-ego product and engineering culture that’s fueled by curiosity — so much so that we build our product out in the open to get feedback earlier and more opportunities to iterate. Every Friday, our engineers demo their work and post videos on our website. There’s nothing more motivating than having a customer pop into the channel to respond to the demo, whether they’re sharing feedback or just reacting enthusiastically (with a comment or one of our custom “Blobby” emojis).
2. Uncover the “why” behind asks
We can’t take on every customer request — if we did, we’d end up with a disjointed product experience that doesn’t work great for anyone. We build with an opinion, but stay flexible enough to solve real customer problems. Our customers sometimes request specific capabilities based on the way they did something in another tool. We really try to understand the “why” behind these requests, and then come up with a solution that meets the underlying need (and maybe other needs) and still provides a cohesive experience.
This often requires developing novel solutions. For example, I recently worked with a customer who had a daily inventory snapshot table. If you don’t know how to use these tables correctly and try to get the total inventory across that week of data, it will show you about seven times the amount you actually have. It’s a common data modeling problem, and the tool the customer used previously had a hacky workaround, but it was complex and impacted the performance of query generation.
I brought it up to one of our engineers, Steven, and instead of replicating the workaround, he took the time to build a cleaner and more performant solution for semi-additive metrics. It addressed the need of the specific customer and it solved a not-so-niche data problem that other tools don’t handle well. Shortly after we released it, three other customers told us how happily surprised they were to discover the feature.
"The speed and agility of the Omni team and their willingness to seek out and incorporate user feedback really stood out to us." Shyam Sivakumar, Head of Data at Ascend
3. Feeling the love
Entering a space as mature, complex, and crowded as BI may seem like a crazy thing to do, but we went in with eyes wide open. We understood that people would have a long list of features, requests, and expectations. But we also knew that there were still many problems and pain points to be solved, despite the huge number of tools available.
To try Omni, data teams have to believe that better BI could exist — an inherently open-minded and optimistic point of view. And that’s exactly how our customers are. It’s the best thing about my job: I get to work with people who are passionate and curious about data, and excited about Omni and our vision for the future.
“Omni is the BI tool of the future - as long as folks are ready for that :).” Rob Adler, Senior Director of Data & Analytics at Tapcheck
We have amazing customers who think deeply about how Omni works and how it could work even better for them. Who take the time to write us bug reports that are as thorough as the ones my team submits to engineering. Who give us detailed feedback and thoughtful feature requests. All things customers wouldn’t do if we didn’t have a strong relationship and a history of delivering on our promises.
We also see our customers bring us with them when they go to a new job, recommend Omni to friends, and — of their own volition — go on social media or Slack communities to share their Omni experience with strangers on the internet.
To me, the willingness to give great feedback, make Omni better, and share Omni with others is the ultimate sign that our customers see how invested we are in their success.
"I definitely had the feeling that we’d be looked after.” Jon Beer, COO at Zapnito
Committed for the long haul #
Some fear that early-stage companies offer great support initially and then let it degrade as they scale. But our relationship with customers isn’t a happy accident or a byproduct of Omni’s stage. Exceptionally good support has been, and will always be, a priority for us and key to our strategy as a business. It’s something deeply important to every member of the Omni team. It’s baked into our financial plans and the way we talk to investors. It’s that important — for us and for our customers.
If this approach inspires you, we’d love to hear from you! Email me anytime at anika [at] omni [dot] co. You can also request a demo or check out one of the open positions on our team (we’re hiring!).