A key part of the Dootrix ethos – and central to our success – is that we forge long-term partnerships with our clients. Confused.com are one of these. Feedback from Confused.com on their experience of us as a supplier has promoted us to reflect on the unique factors that Dootrix brings as a supplier, and how these translate across client relationships.
Dootrix and Confused.com have been working together for a few years now. It’s one of a number of long-term business relationships that we’ve developed with clients – and the fact that we have long established partnerships is, I think, indicative of the way that we work.
It would be easy to be glib about this, but I’ll try not to be. In almost every case the most challenging step in building the level of trust required for a partnership is getting a foot through the door, and that’s completely understandable.
The need to choose the right partner for any IT project is enough to make any client cautious. When you’re looking for a team to work with on application modernisation, data integration or cloud governance, the wrong choice can have serious, long-term consequences.
So, in almost every respect, the onus is on Dootrix to prove itself.
The fact that we do get chosen by major organisations and that we go on to work with them long term is, I believe, testament to a few things.
The first is that we’re Azure through and through. No one here is managing a project on AWS one month, Google Cloud the next and Azure the one after that. That’s true top to bottom. Specialisation has considerable advantages; we’re not interested in becoming jacks-of-all-trades – we aim to do everything within our competence exceptionally well.
Another is that while Dootrix is large enough to deliver everything large organisations are looking for in a tech partner, we’re also of a size where our clients always know who they’re dealing with. No one ever gets lost in the machine.
And thirdly, and possibly the most critically, we are under no illusions that our success as a company is indivisible from that of our clients. We’re not a behemoth that can sail merrily on through the wreckage of failed projects. Our reputation rests on the consistent quality of our work and makes us the ‘safe’ choice, despite our competing against multinational consultancies.
While we will bring all the tried-and-tested approaches to bear on a task, there are also the things we prize that can’t be written into a statement of work: the willingness to go the extra mile, changing tack when the facts change, only treating something as done when it’s finished and working and is a job that we can be proud of.
So when Confused.com’s Head of Engineering, Kristian Parr says that Dootrix is “much more focused on getting us to a place of success rather than ticking off boxes,” he’s acknowledging something that can’t be put into a contract.
And one last thing that I think distinguishes us from some of our competitors: we don’t operate with clients in a world of us and them; when we’re working with partners, there’s just a bigger us.
And, again, I’ll leave it to Kristian to put into words that vital intangible that sums up that key element of our partnership ethic: “Amongst our successful partnerships, this is one that really stands out. Dootrix have been with us for five, six, seven years now. And they're still part of the team, as they always have been.”
Find out more about how we have helped Confused.com achieve their goals – and their feedback on our work with them