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Customers Go First — How To Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Score and Net Promoter Score

Many entrepreneurs, technologists and product managers will nod upon hearing this universal business truth: customers go first. In the end customers are the reason businesses exist, by adopting and paying for a company’s product or service.

The term “customer success” is a hot topic these days, and can mean various things, but below I’ll explain the term with the meaning — how your company interacts with customers to guarantee success for it after the interaction.

These five words and different topics are what we’ll try to identify in the text below (or the video above).

  1. Ask — Who, what and when to ask questions to improve your product.
  2. Listen — Summarize and organize the information and share it with the team.
  3. Measure — Connect trends with business objectives.
  4. Understand — Get insights from the information you’re receiving.
  5. Act — Make decisions to improve your product, service and customer experience.

CSAT

If you have a SaaS company or any kind of software company, you need to make sure the customers have a way to communicate with you.

In this communication, you need to think about what kind of user you want to open your lines of communication with, what kind of questions they should be answering and when they should do this.

The developers at itnig are trying to figure out what kind of features to focus on next to keep CSAT and NPS high.

To make sure your customers are happy, you should measure customer satisfaction rates (CSAT). You can rate it however you want, a normal way is by numbers, stars or faces with different expressions.

In SaaS products a good CSAT is 98 and above, and an acceptable score is 90. Everything else is bad. Because the customer usually is telling you what you’re doing wrong, it’s (usually) fairly easy to get a good score, just make sure you have a great customer service team, that’s key.

NPS

The juiciest part of the acronyms mentioned is Net Promoter Score (NPS).

It measures what kind of attitude your customer has towards your product. Only the 9th and the 10th best customers are promoters, which are the best customers you can hope for. These people will promote your product to people they meet. The neutrals in the middle, the 8th and the 7th, don’t do anything for you. And last, but not least, the detractors that represent the bottom 6 of your customer base. These people have a negative influence on your product or service.

To measure NPS you can use platforms such as Wootric, Delighted or Zendesk.

You don’t need to be a Mensa member to understand that getting a good score can be pretty hard, when 60 percent of the bar is detractors.

The formula is: NPS = % of promoters – % of detractors.

So if you have 20 percent promoters, 50 percent neutral, and 30 percent detractors, you’ll have -10 in NPS score, which is really bad.

Some NPS problems are simple to fix, you need to segment the customer base and try to solve as many of the recurring customer-issues as possible. Other NPS related challenges take longer time and need bigger and more drastic changes to fix. After segmenting the customers, you need to group the feedback into components of your product and service, and put your team to work on item after the other.

Companies that takes NPS scores seriously, aim at scores between 60 and 80.

https://upscri.be/285782-2

Listen, intensely and honestly

If you didn’t pick up that listening closely to your customer is extremely important, it’s time to note that done.

But listening and organizing the data isn’t enough alone. A customer that actually contacts you to give you feedback on your product or your service is valuable so make sure the people they speak to are understanding and empathic.

Don’t try to push other or cheaper products on a customer that contacts you about an issue. You have a valuable shot at solving important problems for your company, don’t ruin it by trying to sell them more stuff they don’t want.

To get any value from these processes, you need to share all the customer feedback with the team, not only to implement changes. You never know who might sit on solutions or ideas for improvement.

To get real life examples see the video above, where Jordi explains how Redbooth tackled some of their challenges with CSAT and NPS.

This post was transcribed by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig.

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How I Got Hired & Ditched By UBER

This is not a picture of me.

There is a lack of engineers everywhere, but finding talent is especially hard in the Bay Area.

I’m from Spain but 5 years ago I went three months to SF, to attend a couple of conferences and visited some friends.
At that time I was trying to start something, but I changed my mind and I started looking for jobs in the US instead.

Getting in contact

Every single company I visited was recruiting.

Tech companies provided pizza, beers and tons of famous, smart people to talk about smart things. All to attract talent.

I sent out many resumes, but 90% of the times I didn’t receive any response, and I couldn’t figure out what was missing.

I have a CS degree, five years of experience and lots of open source contributions in cutting edge technologies. My best guess was that US companies were not willing to sponsor me a `H-1B` visa.

I was close to giving up and going back to Spain when I received two calls from a couple of companies. One of them was Klout, the social media analytics company that sold for $200 million. The second call was from a company that was just starting up at the time, they wanted to disrupt the transportation industry.

The interviews

The first interviews are always done by telephone. They ask you about your background, some theoretical questions and some *puzzles*.

When they have decided that you’re smart enough to meet face to face, the real interview starts, and it’s not a normal meet and greet, it can last up to three hours.

You talk with people from different departments, answer more questions and solve more *puzzles* on whiteboards.

– Implement a function that calculates square roots
 — Sort and concat arrays in a optimal way
 — Guess the two missing numbers in a array with `n — 2` length containing `1..n` unsorted numbers
 — Calculate the number of digits for a given number
 — Implement a function to detect palindromes
 — …

Most of them were doable, but I think they were missing some amazing developers that may not know how to solve those problems,
but they are capable of solving real-life problems (fix this bug, port this library, refactor this code…).

Some of the theoretical questions I had (mostly javascript related):

– What is a closure and which disadvantages does it have:
 — What is hoisting.
 — How does `this` work.
 — How `float` works and which issues does it have.
 — How does the event loop work on the browser and how to delay a function to the next tick.
 — How to optimize CSS, and how does specificity work.

The offers

Both companies I interviewed for offered to sponsor me a H-1B visa and a good salary.


I ended up accepting one of the offers because they where more transparent with the stock options (which I later discovered not to be so great after all), and because they told me that I could work remotely until getting the visa.

I signed the contract, opened a bank account, left my job and came back to Spain.

The silence

Back in Spain I started to prepare myself for the new job — I was looking forward joining a new team. I learnt Python because I saw some people using it at that company’s offices.

I was super motivated and willing to start! I even sent some emails to the CTO to get some instructions on how to setup my development environment.

At my starting date I received the first email from the CTO saying that they were not able to get my visa and that they were thinking about the aspect of working remotely.

I answered them that it wasn’t a problem for me. I had been working remotely for a while and it had never been an issue.

What happened next? Nothing. Silence. I was completely ignored.

The problem

Getting a working visa in the US is not easy. If it was, most developers would be working there. It has gotten a lot better the last years, but companies should start to be more open minded about hiring remote workers.

There is a huge deficit of talent in the US, and a lot of wasted (and way cheaper) talent in other countries around the world. An average engineer in the Bay Area can cost around $100k+. In Spain, the same engineer costs significantly less.

Even though I’m happy I didn’t end up in the states, it would have been cool to be one of the first developers at Uber.

The solution

Ironically, while I was on holiday in San Francisco I was working for [Teambox](now Redbooth), a company with their development team based in Spain.

It was an amazing experience, the development was happening 24 hours a day. The git repository was constantly receiving commits, never sleeping.

It was a great time, that I now look back on as me and Jordi Romero are working on our new project Factorial.

Luckily there’s more and more great companies being built in Europe, and there’s no need to go to the US to land a fantastic job as a developer. Both Madrid (14th) and Barcelona (9th)are climbing on EDCI’s digital city index list every year, and more and more startups are getting funded.

A recent report by Atomico predicts even greater times for European tech in the years to come, so no need to apply for the green card lottery this year, just hold on to your European passport.

This memoir was written by the CTO of Factorial.

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The issues with the startup accelerator business model, & the emergence of venture builders

According to the internet it’s thousands of startup accelerators programs & incubators out there, looking for the most talented startups to accelerate.

What started with Y-combinator back in 2005, was followed by Techstars, 500 startups and a couple of thousand other organizations which now all are competing for the same talent, according to Angel Garcia, director of Startupbootcamp IoT, Data & Cybersecurity in Barcelona.

It’s turning into a very crowded space, it’s much harder to find good startups for every round we do.

He continues:

Online I’ve seen lists of thousands of so-called accelerators. Many of them provide mentors, a table to work at and other perks, but they don’t run sustainable businesses.

From the left: Angel Garcia (Startupbootcamp) Patricio Hunt (Intelectium) & Bernat Farrero (itnig).

The business model

Just like venture capital investors, both accelerators and incubators are betting on a large volume of projects, and hope one out ten get’s a big exit.

That’s why it’s hard to say exactly what accelerators that are successful and which that are failing, says itnig president Bernat Farrero and points to the business model:

In practice, we’ve had virtually no time to see any of this models succeed just yet, even the few biggest ones have kept growing their expectations and none has yet consolidated and shown a real business success case.

Unlike most accelerators that are funded by VC’s, Startupbootcamp is funded by corporations that all get access to the products the different startups are creating, according to Garcia.

We’re different from most of the accelerators out there. It’s not only our business model, but 82 percent of our startups that have gone through our program is still going, and that’s a high number.

Evolving into venture builders?

Both Farrero and Hunt used to run accelerator programs, but later chose to leave the space to dedicate a deeper focus on fewer projects.

President Farrero explains that itnig didn’t find it sustainable to have a large number of startups go through a fixed program:

If we look at all of the accelerators today, both the ones we call successful, and all the others, I’ve never heard of anyone being profitable.

Startup studios or venture builders has been gaining more and more tractions lately, with studios like eFounders, Betaworks, Idealab & itnig pumping out new companies annually the last years.

Also Patricio Hunt, managing partner at Intelectium has been transitioning over to an approach of building talented teams, instead of accelerating already existing startups.

We have, as Farrero, evolved into more of a venture builder the last years. We study the markets, talk with corporations and possible future customers, and create products we know are needed.

Talent-focused

Farrero says their approach has changed drastically the last years, they now focus on finding makers:

Instead of using valuable time on accelerating tons of projects, we are using that time to study the markets and current trends, as well as attracting the best talent to come work for us.

Even though Startupbootcamp is working with a different business model, also Garcia stresses the importance of knowing your markets.

As we work in industries where everything is changing very fast, we need to understand the markets better than most people do.

The amount of accelerators getting started is not decreasing, but as the amount of programs increases, the less credibility the accelerator gets.

All the three directors agree that the few accelerators with an established brand will survive, and so will the ones that have implemented sustainable business models, but the rest will have to pivot or innovate into something new, something startups actually need.

To get the full interview, go to the video in top of the article.

The post was written by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig.

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Factorial Will Change The Way Your Company Deals With HR

Co-founders of Factorial Pau Ramon Revilla (CTO) and Jordi Romero (CEO).

There’s a new startup in town, and we’re lucky to say it’s an itnig company.

Factorial wants to make the HR role both easier and less time consuming through their cloud-based HR platform.

Factorial has already started on-boarding several Barcelona companies to their platform.

Many small and medium businesses don’t have a budget for a full-time HR person, so managing employees, their contracts, pay slips, time off, benefits, insurance and much more, is left to the CEO, the office manager or someone else.

All of these tasks, and more, are automated through Factorial, explains CTO and co-founder Pau Ramon Revilla.

Our customer interviews shows that HR managers use 80 percent of their time on cumbersome chores, and only 20 percent on building culture and boosting productivity. We want to flip those numbers.

Bringing the Zenefits model to Europe (and the world..)

Even though there’s several HR management platforms in Europe, they are not designed for the needs of small and medium businesses (payroll, benefits, time-management, etc.) that Factorial offers, says CEO and co-founder Jordi Romero:

The initial seed idea was to bring the Zenefits model to Europe.

Zenefits was born from newly introduced regulations that forced American companies to provide certain benefits for their employees, but European markets work very differently, and this is where Factorial comes in. They’re currently exploring what to offer in the different markets, and they’ll start in a few European countries, according to CEO Romero.

Usually all companies reinvent their own way of dealing with HR processes, using forms and excel sheets, which is very time consuming. We’ll change that.

Moving fast

Only three months ago Jordi and Pau didn’t have a product, but they’ve been building non-stop and have recently started on-boarding companies into their platform, according to CTO Ramon:

We’re testing what’s basically our MVP with 5–6 companies in Barcelona now, and so far the feedback has been good.

They’re currently raising their first round of funding, and will be using the next 6 months to build an international product, and then establish partnerships for benefits around Europe.

“The initial seed idea was to bring the Zenefits model to Europe” — Jordi Romero

Both Romero and Ramon are coming from executive positions in SaaS company Redbooth, where they worked as VP of business development and CTO.

We’re bringing a lot of valuable knowledge and experience from Redbooth on how to run a SaaS company, the metrics, how to convert users in to actual customers, and much more.

Targeting startups

Factorial is meant for all small and medium businesses, but the first months their targeting startups, says CEO and co-founder Romero.

The co-founders in talks with the itnig design and business development team.

Tech startups usually have higher salaries, and are more creative in ways to compensate their employees. At the same time, they’re often very depending on efficiency and productivity, so it’s a very good fit for Factorial.

Factorial is one of six companies currently being built in itnig’s venture builder in Poble Nou, and all the other startups in the ecosystem are using Factorial.

Now the race to build a great team has begun, says Ramon:

We’re looking for great developers to help us build Factorial. As the CTO of Redbooth I’ve learned a lot about how to grow a team, create a good culture and to foster productivity and creativity. I’m looking forward to applying this knowledge in Factorial.

This post was written by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig.


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Parkimeter Wins CECOT Award

The Catalan organization CECOT representing over 6000 entrepreneurs, awarded itnig startup Parkimeter with the award for best new company.

Once every year CECOT hosts what they call “the night of the entrepreneur” in Barcelona. Here they award different kind of local entrepreneurs, and this year it was co-founders of Parkimeter, Jordi Badal and Ferran Gatius turn to get honored.

The startup that allow you to reserve, pay and find parking spots for your car, was created in 2013, and has been experiencing massive growth in both users and parking facilities the last years.

Soon 500 places to park

As of today, the company offers their users over 380 different locations to park their cars.

Parkimeter’s plan is to reach 500 parking facilities by 2017 in over 80 cities in Spain.

Parkimeter has parking facilities all over Spain.

And it seems like the service was needed, as the startup has parked over 50.000 cars the last three years. To make the parking experience even better, Parkimeter will in a matter of weeks release the new app so you easily can book your parking through your phone.

Even though the area around Barcelona is the one with most parking facilities at the moment, Parkimeter plans for expansion. They raised a seed round this June and plans to start their expansion to the rest of Europe by next year.

“How parking has been changed through technology, is similar to how the travel sector was disrupted 15 years ago,” say co-founder of Parkimeter Jordi Badal.

Smart sustainable cities

Parkimeter recently spoke at the SmartCity conference InFocus 2016, held in the Chinese city of Yinchuan this September.

This year’s CECOT event was also focused on building smart and sustainable cities, that are able to offer services that bring improvements to the lives of its citizens.

The Parkimeter team in their headquarters in Barcelona.

At the CECOT conference smart cities like New York and Dubai presented their plans for the future along with Barcelona represented by Parkimeter which introduced their initiatives to facilitate parking according to people’s needs, optimizing traffic, reducing the visual impact and aligning itself with the policies of mobility each city has.

But Parkimeter does only care about the environment, they also care about your wallet, as Parkimeter’s facilities is up to 50 percent cheaper than normal street parking.

……………………………….

This post was written by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig.