There is no metric more important than customer success.
Or, as some in the industry have said, customer delight. It’s one of, if not "the" most critical measures of success at HYCU.
The best measures for customer success are summed up by answering the following two questions:
- What is our customer’s experience with HYCU? and
- Would they recommend or purchase again in future?
While there are many ways to arrive at the customer delight destination, the metric we measure, much as others do in the industry, is through Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS is an effective management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a company's customer relationships. It serves as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research and can be correlated with revenue growth. NPS has been widely adopted with more than two thirds of FORTUNE 1000 companies using the metric.
Much of the work to get HYCU to its current score of 91 today has been a team effort. From engineering through support through our customer success and engagement executives. We sat down with Shreesha Pai Manoor who heads up our customer success effort at HYCU to get more insight into why so many customers love HYCU and look to us to help solve their multi-data protection, migration and DR challenges now, and well into the future.
Q: Can you tell us little more about your role as the head of Customer Success?
SPM: Right now, it is pretty well understood by most organizations that a customer success organization is a must in every company. Building customer loyalty, much like trust in any relationship, does not just happen overnight. A lot of little instances of support, respect and timely interventions help propel you to build trust and loyalty. Once trust is gained, it is your duty to make sure that the trust is intact and it also calls for sensitive strategizing.
We are a customer-centric organization. That involves the following:
- Innovating for customers and partners
- Focus on simplicity and ease of use
- Best customer service
- Walk the talk, what you see is what you get 😊
- Complementing the platform you support
- Customer First attitude
We keep customers in mind. We look at what the customer needs first and foremost. In my role, it’s about customer advocacy. It means talking to customers in whatever means they are introduced to HYCU through their journey and experience of buying and using HYCU. NPS is an industry standard way of measuring customer loyalty and we use a leading industry platform to measure it. Once a customer is onboarded they receive an automated survey and they are asked would they recommend our solution and services. The tool gives us a platform to integrate with our other tools to have a single pane of glass to monitor the customer journey with us.
Q: How do you use NPS within HYCU?
SPM: NPS helps to establish a close relationship with the customer and to ensure you are developing and fostering loyalty. It helps to determine those who are likely to promote you, to those who are more neutral, to those who may not be as inclined to recommend you at this point in time. We all strive to have customers that are promoters. It’s ingrained in our organization, from leadership to engineering to sales and support to customer success. It’s part of our DNA.
Q: What did you have to do for HYCU’s score to be at 90 today?
SPM: We strive day in and day out to raise our score. It hasn’t always been at 90, but we have steadily improved it to where it is today over time. From the moment the customer starts their journey with HYCU, we use NPS to secure feedback on our products, what their experience was with our sales process, our POC process, our services, the ways in which we communicate, our support portal, and to make sure we receive open and honest feedback so we can continue to improve. It’s about moving from a transaction model to a strategic partner with our customers
Q: How does this tie back to engineering?
SPM: Just to reiterate, we use NPS to enhance all parts of our customers journey, not just product or customer support. That said, from the customer’s feedback, once we onboard and interact with them, they share what they like and what they would like us to improve on. We share that feedback directly with engineering and prioritize customer specific feedback. As a nimble organization, we can turn around and solve problems very quickly.
Q: What makes the work you and HYCU are doing with NPS different than others in the industry?
SPM: Typically you can measure NPS in different ways. Some companies may only touch a customer infrequently, or maybe just ask only the one person actually using the product or only ask people who have had a successful support ticket closure. For us, it’s important to touch everyone who we engaged with during a customer purchase. The second item is getting continuous feedback. We are continuously surveying our customers, appropriately, in short surveys. That’s one major reason why our customer response rate is almost twice what the industry standard is.
Q: Can you share an anecdote of a customer interaction you are particularly proud of?
SPM: There was one customer comment that has stuck with me over time. This one customer has been in our industry for more than 20 years so he’s worked with a number of companies. While he has been in the industry for a long time, he said he felt like his voice was heard by HYCU. While he may not have been the largest customer, the way we responded and helped solve both a short-term and long-term need, really stood out for him. He not only felt appreciated, but he felt we truly treated all customers as equals.
To learn more about HYCU, our customer-centric approach and why our NPS score is at an all-time high, you can reach us at info@hycu.com or sign up at tryhycu.com.
(NOTE: This blog was updated on 6/8 to reflect HYCU's latest NPS score update from 90 to 91.)