Caring for Our Customers Remains Our Number 1 Reason for Being
Net Promoter Score, or NPS®, has been around since 2003, and is still going strong. It’s been around longer than Facebook, Gmail and the iPhone. The first article presenting NPS focused on AOL and its inability to provide great customer service via their primary contact method - the phone. While there are other alternatives and adaptations, at UKCloud we still see NPS 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 into 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 by tallying up responses and subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. For example, if 78% of respondents are promoters, 10% are detractors and 12% are passives, the NPS would be 78-10 = 68. This final score is used to gauge how well we’re performing. At UKCloud, we measure NPS at multiple points in the customer lifecycle, from the point of implementing a service onto our award-winning cloud platform; through every support interaction, as well as on the general delivery of the service.
The Evolution of customer services
Our journey over the last 5 years has been incredible and we’re proud of everyone at UKCloud who makes a difference every day to our customers. We’ve created and evolved a customer service team and culture that’s embedded into 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 5 years and as of July 2022, we’ve hit a record high of Delivery NPS with a score of +68. To put this into perspective, with a maximum possible score of +100, +68 is exceptionally high for any industry (and certainly so for the IT and Cloud industry) as it demonstrates very few detractors and passives compared to promoters.
As with many things in life, our NPS score will and has fluctuated due to a range of variables – many of which are out of our control. However, we continually monitor customer feedback and evolve and enhance our services, processes and support to tackle any issues we might face. A key example is how we’ve responded to feedback on our VMware cloud service by commencing a significant project to completely refresh the service – highlighted on our VMware innovation page.
The COVID-19 effect
As with all organisations globally, COVID-19 created a unique service and support challenge; for us, our partners and our customers. We were able to instantly move to full remote working, including transitioning our operations centre to a fully remote model. As required, UKCloud maintained office-based support, and continues to maintain a hybrid working model. This enables us to maintain high levels of support, while evolving to harness the accepted advantages this model brings to the environment and our personal lives. As is witnessed by our positive NPS scores, customer satisfaction has improved during this time and continues to increase as we become more efficient and successful in providing excellent services and support to our customers.
The results are in
Our teams have delivered incredible outcomes over the last 12 months with the addition of streamlined processes, a series of new services, enhanced professional service skills and being able to work directly with customers to optimise the use of their data and transition to cloud native services. And following our recent wave of NPS at +68, we now move into a new era for UKCloud by delivering on a best-in-class infrastructure with significantly improved VMware implementation, new VMware-based containerisation solutions, refreshed Microsoft Azure propositions and underlying features and functionality to make it easier than ever to migrate to and use our services.