and a little on Net Promoter Scores…
When I last wrote here back in May 2019, I had just taken on the position of Global Support and Training Manager. My mandate then was increased focus on the structure and delivery of Soft Tech Support. Today I’d like to update you on where we’re at – and the good news is that it is indeed good news.
Part of what we’ve done over the past six months is the introduction of Net Promoter Scores to our support portal. This is a useful measure of our performance in the eyes of you, our clients, in the delivery of Support.
For those who haven’t previously encountered Net Promoter Scores, or NPS (it is a bit of a marketing term!), here’s a quick explanation. The NPS is an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others. It helps gauge overall satisfaction and loyalty to a brand, with the score calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. There’s more information for the curious at netpromoter.com.
What may be interesting (certainly in the context of what I’ll be sharing more about in a moment) is that what’s considered a good score varies by industry. Anything higher than zero is considered good. Hitting +50 is excellent and anything over +70 is exceptional.
While the system we use for our support ticketing has a built-in customer survey, this isn’t suitable for NPS scoring, so we went ahead and created a custom setup (we are software developers, after all!). Every time a ticket is resolved, you’re invited to participate and tell us what you REALLY think about the level of support you received from Soft Tech while resolving your ticket.
Of course, not everyone takes us up on this offer. But, over the course of 10 weeks, we had NPS ratings on a little over 6% of our resolved tickets, with the majority of the ratings being 9 or 10 out of 10.
Now, while I don’t want to blow trumpets, I am really proud of the work our Support team is doing.
That said, we did receive lower ratings from some customers, and these lower ratings are what we are watching carefully. The lower scores confirm something inherent to quality service delivery: it is never a destination. Particularly in the fast-paced, complex and ever-changing environment that is software, maintaining great service levels is all about maintaining focus. If there are laurels, one can never rest on them!
And in that vein, with any score of 8 or less, we have a system in place to immediately reach out to the customer in question, using the score as an opportunity for ironing out issues on the spot and learning from the interaction. This way every customer will benefit from improved service should a similar situation arise.
In other matters…
We continue to develop our training accreditation project for staff and customers; we’re also increasing support staff numbers, which have grown by 30 percent in the past months. That’s helping meet our ‘follow the sun’ support methodology, so no matter where in the world you are, you get the help needed, when required.
Finally, one further measure we’ve introduced is a new Online Chat. When you visit our website, you can strike up a conversation and find what you’re looking for a lot faster. I invite you to give it a go.
Just hit the ‘chat’ button found on the bottom right of any page on our website and see how we can help…
