Great customer support is vital to any software company that wants happy customers. Though we would all rather everything work perfectly all the time for everyone, preparing for missteps is wiser than assuming they will never happen.

However, for SaaS companies, customer support can be far more than the team that fields calls from customers having trouble. The continuous release cycles of SaaS offer a much greater opportunity for customers to be heard and for customer support to influence the product and the company.

That has certainly been the case for Signiant as we’ve transitioned to developing cloud native SaaS, but I wouldn’t have known the extent to which that was true before our customer support team was awarded an exceptionally high Net Promoter Score for 2017 of 97%.

I reached out to Jad Abdul-Rahim, Signiant’s Director of Sustaining Engineering and Technical Support, to ask about the score and ended up publishing an article about it on MESA. But before you jump to another page, here are a few basics.

What’s a Net Promoter Score?

A Net Promoter Score is an aspect of Voice of the Customer data, which is a research program some companies implement to get honest feedback from customers in order to improve their products or services.

Based off of a customer survey inquiring about their level of satisfaction, a Net Promotor Score is the percentage of customers that are very satisfied, so satisfied that they would promote your product or service. Signiant’s customer support team asked this question and received about 150 responses over the year.

“On a scale of 0 – 10, how satisfied were you with the resolution we provided today?”

The results were then categorized into three buckets. 97% gave a ranking between 9-10.

• Promoters (9-10): People who are highly satisfied with your product or service and rave about you.
• Passives (7-8): People who are content with being a customer of your business, but don’t love you.
• Detractors (0-6): People who are not happy with your product or service and have had a negative experience.

What is an average Net Promoter Score?

According to a study conducted by CustomerGauge, 44% is an average Net Promoter Score across industries. Granted, most of these industries are not software and even fewer develop cloud native SaaS.

Source: CustomerGauge 2016 NPS Benchmarks Survey Report

Cycle of Continuous Improvement

While Signiant’s high Net Promoter Score is supported by the nature of SaaS continuous release cycles, it is primarily a result of our support team’s exceptionally high commitment to our customers and to representing their feedback to our engineering team. Over the years, they’ve created a feedback loop that we dubbed the Cycle of Continuous Improvement in the article. It goes like this: