Notify Technology: We’re a Safety Tech SaaS start up, but we sure pack a serious NPS punch – Worth Olympic Silver or Gold? Our customers can decide!
We recently completed a survey across our customer base to evaluate how we’re performing, as we look to bring safety technology to a growing number of clients across different sectors and in different countries.
So, for the uninitiated what exactly is Net Promoter Scoring (NPS) and why does it matter?
Well first and foremost it’s a measure used to reflect the loyalty of your customer base by asking ONE simple specific question:
“On a scale of 1 – 10, how likely are you to recommend us to your business contacts and network?”
The score out of 10 determines whether somebody is a detractor, passive or a promoter in relation to your business.
The graphic above shows the split by different scores.
Being new to a leadership role in the Customer Success team at Notify, I want to get it right for our customers every time, but I also want to understand where we are not quite getting it right. This aligns directly with one of our four core values: Constructive Dissatisfaction.
I’ve found using the NPS approach really useful once I got my head around it. NPS has been around a LONG time; originally invented in 2003 by the clever people at Bain & Co.
I came to NPS because I really thrive on understanding where we can make the customer experience a bit better and learning when things haven’t gone to plan. I’m proud to be working in a position where I represent the success of our customers – who for me are the sole reason for having a business in the first place.
After all, without them where would we be?!
As part of my mission to understand our customers, I recently invited them to respond to the above NPS question. The results provided by each customer helped to generate our NPS score for Notify, of which I have to say I am extremely proud.
But just before I share why I’m so proud – a bit more on using NPS.
The way the scoring works on NPS, your business ends up with a score between -100 and +100. The final score basically shows the NET number of your customers who would actively recommend you to others.
Although the scores can technically be between -100 and +100, as a guide a result of +20 is considered ‘favourable’ and +50 is deemed ‘excellent’.
Notify scored +53, which I think is amazing for such a young company who deals with clients of all shapes and sizes in loads of different sectors
For transparency, I’m sharing with you how we ended up with our score at Notify:
- 65% of our customers scored 9-10 (these are the promoters)
- 23% of customers scored 7-8 (these are the passives)
- 12% scored 6 or less (the detractors)
To calculate the NPS score you subtract your detractors (stated as a number, in our case 12) from your promoters (in our case 65). So that’s how we got to +53
NPS Calculation: +65 – 12 = +53
Why am I proud, you might ask?
Considering the speed of Notify’s growth and the significant number of users on our platform, I believe this score reflects our approach to building pioneering software that is not only simple, smart, and secure but is backed up by a real focus on customer service and engagement. We take real pride in being real people, who talk to our customers and hold our hands up if we get something wrong.
Being a relative newbie within my leadership role, I was naturally concerned about getting things wrong. We’re all human, after all! However, with the support and reassurance from our leadership team at Notify, I have taken the reins and worked extremely hard to ensure that our customers receive the best service and support, have complete confidence in our software, and feel valued and listened to.
And a bit like the Olympics, I don’t need a score to tell me we’re doing the right things, but it’s really encouraging to see the positive feedback we’ve received from our many customers. I feel like I’ve won a medal!
What does this score actually mean?
Well in reality the score on its own doesn’t mean a lot. That’s why we’ll check back in a few months and see whether we’re moving the score up or down.
But – a bit like the Olympics – you can look at a medal table and see how you compare to others. I have to say when I tried to get published NPS scores from safety software companies, I really struggled to find them (could Notify be the first Health and Safety software company to publish their NPS?).
However, I did come across an interesting blog sharing some bench-marking stats…
The above graphic by Retently shows NPS scores across various sectors including B2B Software & SaaS businesses (the one that we fit within – Notify NPS score has been added for reference). Original source: https://www.retently.com/blog/good-net-promoter-score/
According to Retently, the average for B2B Software and SaaS companies seems to be a rather sickly score of 30. I’m therefore even more delighted that Notify has achieved the score of 53 because that shows we are doing something different.
Whilst it’s clear we are doing a lot right, there are always areas we can improve. That’s what Customer Success is all about. We are committed to not becoming complacent – the only thing that is constant is the shifting expectations, problems and demands of customers. I believe it’s important to recognise that we live in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world and we need to be resilient and agile enough to constantly reassess and adapt, when necessary.
I also recognised that our amazing NPS score won’t be “THE” metric that determines how successful our customers’ experience is. That’s why I’m planning on building towards a Customer Health Score – something I plan to blog about in a future post.
How do I plan on continuing to delight within our Customer Success Team?
We’ve already spent time speaking to our customers on Webinars, at Focus Groups and, in our latest Notify Product Advisory Council Meeting in July. We included a slot to provide our “Top Tips” on the Notify platform and demonstrated how we do listen and act upon feedback.
We love the model of Plan, Do, Check, Act and we use that to help us continually improve!
In the words of Notify’s Product Owner, Neilson Watts: “Our job is to listen to the GOOD, the BAD and the UGLY”. Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable helps us to laser focus on what we need to improve.
Well, I’m not sure who he’s calling ugly – but I’m delighted to say that the lines of communication are well and truly open. We want to hear from anyone who is interested in discussing Notify’s NPS experience further, sharing hints and tips on their approach to Customer Success, Networking or better still if you are keen on wanting to know more about joining us in the #SafetyRevolution.
Look out for this trending across our social messaging! Give myself or the company page a follow using the below links:
Notify on LinkedIn
Donna Crammond on LinkedIn
We are all on a journey together and through using our customer led feedback, we will continue delivering simple, smart, secure technology that propels us towards accomplishing our global mission of “Making a Billion People Safer at Work”!
