When Customers Delight Us

I think many companies today work hard at trying to delight their customers. (I know Tableau certainly does and that's one of the things I love about working here.) But it's such a treat when a customer delights us - as our customer Piort Motyka of Kwantum did.

Piotr Motyka has been a Tableau user for about 16 months. In that time, he has built impressive visualizations for his automotive market research data.

In this most recent case, he took our data visualization application normally used for data analysis and visual analytics and cleverly found a way to share his best wishes for a great 2008. And in doing so, he's probably challenged our development team to think about our application in new ways.

Certainly, we never set out to build a graphics design tool and I don't think Piotr would call himself a graphic designer. But he has encouraged us to see how something we've built can be used in different ways - ways we probably never intended!

In fact, a lot of our customers send us examples of their visual data analysis efforts. Usually we're not at liberty to share them due to client confidentiality. (For examples we can release, see our Visual Examples pages.) Whether we can share them or not, we love seeing how customers are using our products - it makes building better products that much easier. So if you're a Tableau user, we welcome your examples and stories. Send them to your account manager or to me - we'll make sure our development team sees the creative stuff you're doing.

So thank you Piotr for delighting us - and happy new year to you and all our Tableau customers. What a great way to start the new year.