The Intersection of Culture and the Customer Experience

Paul Myott, Vice President of Organizational Effectiveness and Internal Communication, DataBank

Kathy Skobe, Director of Customer Success, DataBank

Building and maintaining a strong organizational culture is one of the most challenging aspects of business leadership. At DataBank, we’ve learned that the “maintaining” part is often harder than the initial building effort.

While many companies focus on defining their values and hoping they stick, we’ve discovered that culture requires the same intentional, systematic approach as any other critical business function. The key insight that transformed our approach: culture isn’t something that happens to your organization, it’s something you actively hire for, measure, and nurture at every level.

Cultural engagement doesn’t require grand gestures. It’s about the daily choices that either strengthen or weaken the fabric of our organization and ultimately shape how customers experience working with us.

Building Culture by Design, Not by Default

The data center industry is heavy on mergers and acquisitions, where it’s common to see companies with a patchwork of different cultures existing under one roof.

We experienced this firsthand during our growth phase over the past few years when we completed four acquisitions in a short period, creating what we call a “Franken-culture.” Employees would reference doing things “the old way” versus “the DataBank way,” with different approaches competing instead of complementing each other.

While many companies struggle with teams scattered across locations defending their own approaches, we saw this as a competitive advantage waiting to be unlocked. Culture became a primary business objective, starting at the C-suite level.

Rather than following the typical “mission-vision-values” playbook, we approached culture building through three strategic phases:

• First, we identified the culture we wanted. Instead of abstract values, we focused on our Purpose, Way, and Impact. This gave us concrete cultural cornerstones centered on being a “data center-people first” organization.
• Second, we shared details about the culture to the whole organization. This meant integrating cultural expectations into job descriptions, performance reviews, and hiring processes so everyone knew that cultural engagement would be measured, not just talked about.
• Third, we operationalized it for the long term. We built systems to maintain culture deliberately. Building culture requires intention but sustaining it requires a long-term commitment. Having a shared lexicon makes day-to-day interactions consistent with our intended culture.

This systematic approach created the framework that now drives every customer interaction at DataBank, and has resulted in an employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) that has gone from the high 30s to above 60 in the last three years.

Three Cultural Cornerstones That Drive Customer Experience

At DataBank, we built our culture around a simple truth: healthy organizational culture requires strong alignment between your higher purpose and clear behavioral expectations. Our higher purpose is “to take away the worry of managing mission-critical IT infrastructure,” and we’ve developed three cultural cornerstones that support this purpose and guide every customer interaction.

• Inspiring confidence means being present and responsive when clients need us most. Our teams take extreme ownership of issues and full accountability for their actions. For example, when a customer calls with a critical issue at 2:00 a.m., that customer will be able to reach someone who treats the emergency as his or her own.
• Putting people first focuses on the relationships that make everything else work. We assume positive intent with each other and extend this naturally to clients. This becomes transparent communication and collaborative problem-solving that clients feel in every interaction.
• Being data centered drives us to solve problems before selling services. We find answers in data and share that knowledge with clients to resolve challenges quickly. This pushes us toward technical excellence, but always in service of clients’ actual needs rather than what we think they should buy.

These three cornerstones provide the cultural framework, but we’ve learned that the most effective way to sustain them is by building teams with the right personality mix from the start.

The Archetype Mix That Delivers Exceptional Customer Experience

DataBank’s approach to culture goes beyond values and behaviors. We design our teams around specific personality and behavioral archetypes that naturally deliver better customer experiences. Through comprehensive assessment, we discovered that our most successful employees predominantly embody three key archetypes: Hero, Everyperson, and Sage.

This creates a powerful combination that customers experience directly:

• Hero team members naturally take on the biggest, toughest challenges. When a customer faces a critical infrastructure crisis, they’re getting someone who thrives on solving problems others can’t.
• Everyperson archetypes ensure our teams have each other’s backs and keep everyone grounded. Customers experience this as seamless collaboration across departments and consistent support from a team that works together rather than passing problems around.
• Sage personalities drive our reliance on data and process. Customers get systematic problem-solving, evidence-based recommendations, and the confidence that comes from working with people who make decisions based on facts, not guesswork.

The result is a well-balanced culture with a clear outcome: We deliver exceptional customer experience by being a winning team that honors our word and has the collective capability to tackle any challenge.

From Culture to Customer Success: A Frontline Perspective

As DataBank’s Director of Customer Success, I (Kathy) see firsthand how our cultural framework translates into real customer outcomes. While our organizational development team has built an impressive cultural foundation, my role is ensuring that foundation becomes tangible value for every client we serve.

Culture isn’t just an internal initiative. Instead, it’s the invisible foundation that determines whether every customer interaction builds trust or erodes it. In the data center industry, where customers are entrusting us with their most mission-critical infrastructure, technical competence is table stakes. What differentiates exceptional service is whether customers feel genuinely supported, understood, and prioritized throughout their journey with us.

This culture translates into customer experience through quick responses to urgent requests and seamless team collaboration on complex problems. Most importantly, customers feel that we genuinely care about their success beyond just equipment maintenance.

When culture and customer experience align, customers don’t just get reliable infrastructure. They get a partnership that enables their business growth and gives them confidence to innovate without worry.

Living the Culture: Employee Recognition in Action

Our employees don’t just know our cultural cornerstones. They live them every single day in their interactions with customers. We see this dedication consistently, and our quarterly DataBank Way awards give us the opportunity to formally recognize employees who embody our culture in exceptional ways.

Recent nominations showcase exactly how our cultural framework translates into outstanding customer experiences:

• One employee was nominated “for the way he continually took ownership in his data center, always making sure clients and account teams were aware and in-sync on issues in the facility.”
• Another was recognized “for her efforts in several difficult projects migrations, coordinating between customer and network teams, resolving complex server issues by engaging customers directly, and ultimately leading to higher customer confidence and satisfaction.”

These aren’t isolated examples. They represent the daily reality of how DataBank employees approach customer relationships, guided by the cultural principles that define who we are as an organization.

What Our Customers Say: Where Culture Pays Off

All of this cultural work has one ultimate test: how customers actually experience working with DataBank. The proof isn’t in our mission statements or internal awards. It’s in what customers tell us directly through our Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys and scores.

The results speak for themselves. Customers consistently highlight the personal connections and proactive support that set us apart: “Positive, friendly and proactive team minded environment. Reachable at any time during business hours and after,” and “The staff are some of the best in the business! Always helpful and always willing to go the extra mile for the customer.”

The specificity of their feedback shows how individual team members embody our cultural cornerstones. One customer praised their local team: “The professionalism, friendliness, and support from the local team. The team has been nothing short of fantastic to deal with and are a shining example of what your company represents.”

Perhaps, most telling are the comments that capture our “People First” approach in unexpected ways: “They keep grape soda in the fridge simply because I like it. Sold.” These moments of personal attention demonstrate that great customer experience often lives in the smallest gestures that show we genuinely care about the people behind the infrastructure.

We recently heard from even more customers who were willing to share their experiences. Some additional highlights:

• Penguin Solutions experienced “flawless delivery” during a project with extremely aggressive deadlines.
• Myers and Stauffer described the DataBank team as an extension of their team, not just a vendor.
• One View Inc. explained how DataBank’s IT support and services were like great healthcare, leading to less ramp-up times and faster resolution.

Culture as the Foundation of Customer Success

From a customer success standpoint, culture isn’t just an internal initiative. It’s the invisible foundation that determines whether every customer interaction builds trust or erodes it. In the data center industry, where customers are entrusting us with their most mission-critical infrastructure, technical competence is table stakes. What differentiates exceptional service is whether customers feel genuinely supported, understood, and prioritized throughout their journey with us.

Great culture becomes the customer’s experience in countless moments: how quickly we respond to their urgent requests, whether our teams collaborate seamlessly to solve complex problems, and most importantly, whether customers sense that we truly care about their success beyond just maintaining their equipment. When culture and customer experience align, customers don’t just get reliable infrastructure. They get a partnership that enables their business growth and gives them confidence to innovate without worry.

The Bottom Line: Small Gestures Can Have the Biggest Impact

Our journey from a “Franken-culture” of competing approaches to a unified cultural framework demonstrates that intentional culture building directly drives customer satisfaction. While our three cultural cornerstones and leadership behaviors provide the structure, it’s often the smallest gestures that make the biggest difference.

The customer who mentioned grape soda in the break room wasn’t just commenting on a beverage. He was recognizing that someone cared enough to notice his preference and act on it. This attention to individual needs, multiplied across thousands of daily interactions, transforms routine business relationships into genuine partnerships. When culture becomes the foundation of every customer touchpoint, technical excellence evolves into trust, loyalty, and the confidence that enables customers to innovate without worry.