'Our customer-first approach lets them outperform industry growth by two or three times,' says Demandware CEO

Customer-first business model 'permeates everything about what we do at Demandware' Thomas Ebling tells Xchange'14

A "customer-first" approach to business from enterprise cloud commerce platform Demandware provider has seen online retailers using its platform "outperform industry averages by two or three times".

That's what Demandware president and CEO Tom Ebling told the audience during his keynote address at Xchange'14, the firm's European summit in Barcelona, describing how the customer-first way of doing business has led to improvements in the profit margins of both Demandware and the retailers that use its services.

"What this is all about is our customers, and during the last 12 months we've had 20 European customers go live with Demandware for the first time," said Ebling. He added that Demandware customers - who include Timberland, Lacoste and L'Oréal - have launched more than 400 websites in 27 countries across Europse using the platform.

Ebling claimed Demandware is more interested in "the success our customers achieve" than some other enterprise service providers.

"I used to be back on the software development side and one of the things that always drove me crazy as a technologist was how our business model didn't care about what happened to the customer after they paid for the software," he said.

"But with Demandware, these are our core operating principles; these are things that we share inside the company; they affect our hiring, our promoting, or reviewing people. And at the top of all of it is our belief that customer success comes first, that's the overriding principle for our business," said Ebling.

"It's obviously part of our business model, but it permeates everything about what we do at Demandware," he continued. "If you go to one of our offices, you'll see we have merchandise and logos of all of our customers, most of our employees wear merchandise of our customers."

He argued that this approach to customer handling has benefited Demandware as much as its customers.

"Our customers have consistently outperformed industry averages, usually by more or two or three times. All of that has resulted in Demandware growth - our revenue has grown with over a 60 per cent compound growth rate over the last five years," he explained.

"We've also grown our number of customers to 226 at the end of June and the number of websites to over 900 and our average revenue per customer has grown from $300,000 to $500,000," Ebling continued.

"Why is that good for you as customers? It allows us to keep investing as we have over the last 12 months and our intention is to keep making those investments because it makes you successful which makes us successful," he said.