Net Promoter Score, or NPS®, has been around since 2003, and is still going strong. The first article presenting NPS focused on AOL and its inability to provide great customer service via their primary contact method the phone. NPS has been around longer than Facebook, Gmail, and the iPhone. While there are other alternatives and adaptations at UKCloud we still see this as a key indicator of how our customers feel about us and it is central to how we measure and drive our customers experience.
A business’ NPS hinges on answers to a single question: How likely are you to recommend our product or service to your friends or family? Responses range from 0 (very unlikely) to 10 (very likely) and Customers are placed in to three groups based on their responses:
- NPS Promoters, who answer 9 or 10
- NPS Passives, who answer 7 or 8
- NPS Detractors, who answer anything from 0 to 6
Once a company has a healthy number of responses we calculate the NPS score and use this to gauge how well we are performing. At UKCloud we measure NPS at multiple points in the customer lifecycle from the point of Implementing your service on to our award winning cloud platform; through every support interaction and on the general delivery of the service.
Back from the Brink
Our journey over the last 3 years has been incredible and I couldn’t be prouder of everyone at UKCloud who make a difference everyday to our customers. We have created a customer service team and culture which is embedded in to everything we do. When we started NPS we were scoring -15 and had a culture built around technology and automation, forgetting the importance of people in the provision of technology services and public cloud. Fast forward 3 years and Q3 of 2019/2020 we hit our record high of Delivery NPS with a score of 56. As with many things in life a high is often met with a low and sadly in Q4 we saw some issues and new customers demanding an improved experience using our Single Sign on Service and our NPS dropped to 19 which was extremely disappointing and meant we had to take action to get the teams re-energized and re-focused.
The COVID-19 Effect
Q1 of this year was always going to be tough with a focus on driving up our Customer Satisfaction and ensuring we provided a quality product, improved features, improved usability, and sustained growth only for COVID-19 to strike. We moved to full remote working including transitioning our Operations centre to a fully remote model. As UKCloud supports such critical infrastructure such as smart meters, ONS and several Hospital Trusts we continued to run a small skeleton office team focused on our Datacentre presence and higher sensitivity platforms. We have been challenged and privileged to work directly on a number of high-profile workloads during this period supporting the fight against the virus. As well as supporting several customers who needed to deliver a working virtual desktop infrastructure in a matter of weeks to continue working during lockdown.
The Results are In
Our teams have delivered incredible outcomes this quarter driving our change success rate to an industry leading 98% through to delivering new SSO features to our customers and directly addressing their feedback improving our monitoring and offering new managed services to take away the burden during these challenging times. Our last wave of NPS has seen us bounce back to +55, and I am excited to see what our talented team of UKCloud employees can do in the coming months as we see more businesses return back to more normal times.