From a "Business" Perspective: A Q&A with Caryn Benzinger, solutions architect and sales engineer

Catalyst: Empirix "helps organizations adopt complex communications solutions with confidence." How do the efforts of you and your colleagues align with this mission?

Caryn Benzinger: It is simple; we ensure confidence by providing quality assurance for the customer experience. Our goal is to help our customers meet their business requirements, resolve the issues that cause them pain, and ensure that their own customers have a superior experience. Unlike other vendors, we do this by developing and servicing comprehensive, customized solutions. While my team and I work primarily with large businesses, this overall goal is common throughout the Empirix organization with customers of all sizes and types.

In addition, there is a real willingness among my colleagues to "think outside the box," which is critical to customer success because solutions often need to be customized to address a customer's unique business requirements. I have the privilege of working with the most talented and engaged people in the industry who are sincerely committed to doing whatever it takes to help our customers achieve their goals.

My colleagues and I also support the Empirix mission by building trust and fostering strong customer relationships. With large organizations in particular, each success leads to new opportunities, both for the customer and for Empirix. The customer can deploy new technologies more confidently, for example, and we can reach out to new teams within the organization.

C: What is your specific role at Empirix, and what experiences do you bring to this role?

C.B.: Before I joined Empirix as a solutions architect and sales engineer, I had been both a "business customer"—operating and managing call centers—and a call center consultant, so I spent the majority of my career working to resolve business challenges, rather than technical concerns, and to meet business objectives.

C.B.: This perspective has been particularly important at Empirix, where our focus is on meeting business requirements and addressing the business challenges our customers face, rather than approaching a problem only in terms of technical features and functionality, as many other vendors do.

C: How have you seen customer requirements and Empirix's offerings evolve over time?

C.B.: It is more important now than ever before to look at technology through the eyes of the business. Certainly, customers' requirements have evolved, but more importantly, customers' perspectives have changed and the notion of what delivers value has changed as well. Organizations can no longer consider technology investments solely from an IT perspective. Most of today's customers are savvy enough to know, at least in general terms, the value of a product from a technical perspective; what they really want to know is how the complete solution we offer can deliver value to the business. How can it help an organization ensure the quality of the customer experience? Or improve application performance? Or reduce downtime? Or increase revenue? What will be the return on investment?

C.B.: To keep pace, Empirix's offerings are evolving as well. We have highly talented engineers who are working "in the lab" to develop new solutions, but we also have a talented team in the field building relationships with customers and helping them translate the technical benefits of Empirix solutions into tangible business value.

C: Empirix is clearly committed to delivering solutions that meet customer requirements. Do you have a personal philosophy that you apply to your work?

C.B.: Everything we do must begin with a focus on the customer and their business requirements. Empirix will succeed—and our customers will succeed—when we identify our customers' business problems and pain points and then do what it takes to develop and implement the solutions to fix them.

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