Calling tech support can be a lot like shopping at your only grocery store after it has initiated an aggressive stop-and-frisk policy. You may have come for food but an enthusiastic pat-down is definitely going to happen.
Think about calling your local cable company for help— Most people would rather shave their head with a cheese grater. I know I will certainly google-fu my issues before picking up the phone to call a vendor.
No product is impervious to problems. Customers understand this but when things go wrong, they expect snappy expertise from the vendor’s support to come to the rescue. Support is a critical aspect of technology consumption and largely determines an overall experience, yet it rarely gets seriously considered when evaluating new technology.
Typically, tech support does not meet customer’s reasonable expectations. As a result, organizations suffer frustrations or perhaps even a disruption to business processes. That’s what makes Cohesity’s accomplishment so impressive. Cohesity recently reported a perfect 100 Net Promoter Score, or “NPS” for short.
NPS is quickly becoming a notable standard in customer satisfaction survey/rating systems and is not limited to support or even technology. Historically, NPS has been used internally by some larger companies to help them understand how they are perceived by customers and to gauge general satisfaction levels.
Basically, customers are asked a single question: “How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” On a scale of 1-10, customers must rate at least a 9 or 10 to be considered a “promoter.”
The scoring system is not 0-100 as common sense would suggest, but rather -100 to +100. A score of 0 would be neutral, having a net of no promoters or detractors, which would not be very good. Most blue-chip tech companies range from 20s to the 30s. Apple currently has an NPS of 72, which is considered outstanding whereas Dell scored a 33.
At my last gig, we bragged about our stellar NPS of 85, and I’ve heard a few other young tech companies use NPS in their pitch with ratings in the upper 80s. Younger, smaller and more innovative tech companies often have much better product support ratings. This is largely due to:
- A Fresh Approach
Established tech companies are often handcuffed to older systems with a large customer base, unable to start over and disrupt their legacy customers. They rely on older infrastructure that is built on manual, reactive processes. Starting fresh, companies can build the support processes right into the products with advanced technology.
- Technological Advancement
Forward-thinking tech companies build the support infrastructure upfront (remote sensors, predictive AI, automation), to be more responsive to problems, often proactively detecting (or even resolving) the majority of support cases. Due to advanced automation and efficiencies, these new companies can often do away with tiered support models that delay resolutions and frustrates customers.
- Single-Product Focus
Often, younger innovative tech companies have only one product to support, so skill, investments and expertise are centered around a singular area. For example, a customer’s first call into support at Cohesity is picked up by a level-3 engineer (in less than two minutes on average) that will have advanced expertise and typically resolve even sticky issues on the initial call.
Cohesity’s support has consistently had a score 90+, which basically meant we do not have unhappy customers. A perfect 100 means that Cohesity customers were not simply satisfied, they were ecstatic. ALL of them. That is ridiculously difficult to do.
Congratulations to all our Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) for reaching this achievement! Statistically, we are unlikely to maintain that forever but, WOW. Cohesity is clearly providing a radically differentiated support experience vs. our contemporaries.
You can read more about Cohesity’s NPS score here.