We sat down with Form.com VP of Services Jeff Wong (pictured) to learn more about his role and how Form.com builds best-in-class solutions for its customers.
Jeff majored in psychology at Colby College and spent a year teaching math in a high-needs area of New York. Jeff was drawn to the emerging market for SaaS distribution, and he spent seven years working for a company specializing in online datarooms. After earning his MBA from Boston University, he took on his current role at Form.com.
What is your role at Form.com?
I’m the VP of services, so I oversee our Professional Services and Support departments.
Professional Services onboards customers and helps them build their solution on the platform. Whether it’s an out-of-the-box deployment or something completely custom, we bridge the gap between where Form.com’s innate functionality lies and where they need it to end up. Because Form.com is so functionally rich to start, we most often help companies get through that last ten or fifteen percent where they might need a custom script, middleware, or integration capability.
Our Support Team is available to help our customers to answer questions and handle concerns with the platform. In both departments, our goal is to maximize value for the client and help them be successful. We strive to satisfy customers both from an implementation standpoint and from a support standpoint.
With our services, customers aren’t buying something with an immediate return on investment. That’s not how this kind of service works. In reality, we help the customers figure out the quickest and best way for them to use Form.com so that they get what they want in the long term.
Is there anything developing at Form.com that you’re excited about?
One of the things that always excites me is how the team works together and how they’re constantly improving the way in which they work together. Specifically, the project delivery team. We have this group of developers whose job is to handle custom development on behalf of our customers. They work with our platform API and have to figure out how to create complete solutions by writing scripts and building integration points between our platform and other systems.
Traditionally, it’s been a waterfall, or fixed, approach. Now, I think that we have a group of developers who have really taken the initiative to think about how can they work in a more agile way. Now, they not only figure out how to respond to customer requests quicker, but they also figure out how to deliver more effective solutions within an even tighter time frame.
Tell us about a time you saw Form.com’s innovation make a meaningful difference for a client.
I actually see that across the board. It’s virtually all the time.
One specific example that comes to mind is a Fortune 100 beverage producer that we helped to transform their customer onboarding process. Previously, they were working from a spreadsheet-based system, and they had to manually collect data and key it into their backend SAP system.
Right now, they’re using Form.com to leverage a vastly improved user interface for collecting data in the field. They use our platform to integrate that data automatically, saving them an enormous amount of time, effort, and money.
While it’s true that our technology can save lives in certain industries, I think the efficiency gains our clients see are across the board. The greatest value that we bring to the table is when the customers themselves buy into the concept and say, “Hey, we will be a better business if we onboard your technology.” That’s where it starts, and it’s where my team comes in to figure out the details, providing a strong foundation for onboarding.
What do you see in the future for Form.com? Where is the company going in the next several years?
Our “secret sauce” at Form.com is that we’re helping people solve their problems on a case-by-case basis. We’re not a one-size-fits-all company because we investigate and handle each client’s problems differently.
Enterprise customers are willing to pay a premium to solve their specific problems. Smaller mom-and-pop shops and midsize businesses are much more cost-sensitive. And they might say, “I’m willing to change my ways so that you can maybe solve some of my problems, and I’ll just live with the rest.”
The enterprise clients are much pickier, and they’ve earned the right to be. They say, “I want you to solve all of these problems for me.” That’s where Form.com specializes, that’s our bread and butter. I don’t see us pivoting away from it anytime soon.
I do see some changes on the horizon. For instance, as we get bigger and scale as a company, we will be able to package the elements we’ve built working with big enterprises. More well-defined use cases, implementation paths, and specific feature sets could be combined into deployable packages so that we can tackle a particular market more effectively.
We could take a validated solution set that’s been proven with an enterprise client and cookie-cutter that out. That would make more extremely effective and rapidly deployable solutions for any given market segment.
What’s the best thing about working at Form.com?
It’s the people. There’s a really interesting group of people at Form.com, and while everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, everyone really cares about the company. Everyone cares about the customers.
I actually just got an email from one of my project managers, and she documented her thoughts on making our process better. She basically said, “Hey, I really think that these steps will improve our documentation process.” I read it, and I was like, wow.
So this person, she works all day, right? Working with customers and trying to deal with projects. And at the same time, she’s thinking about how she can help drive improvements in the department so that she’s more effective. She’s thinking about how her team as a whole can be more effective.
That culture and attitude is something that I really enjoy working here. You have people that genuinely care. They care about the company, and they care about the customers. If people were just here to collect a paycheck for showing up from nine to five, it wouldn’t be worth it.
At Form.com, you have a group of people that are all trying to become better. We take on interesting and often difficult challenges, but we take them on together. That’s what makes it so enjoyable. Everyone is pitching in to make Form.com better, and everyone is learning together.
