The world is changing fast and customers are more demanding than ever. The challenge for organisations is to continuously meet the expectations of customers. How do we manage this challenge? And how important is our customers’ feedback for us to improve our services? This blog will hopefully give you an insight into our business and the way we appreciate and use the feedback we receive.
Fuga Cloud by Cyso
But first, let’s take a few steps back. Fuga Cloud is created by the founders of Cyso. A Managed Hostingprovider from Alkmaar specialized in… Yes, you’re right: Managed Hosting. A service in which we provide a full managed hosting solution in order to make life easier for our customers. A cooperation based on personal contact. It is an understatement to say that launching a Public Cloud is out of our comfort zone. An IaaS service where customers can register directly via our website and launch a virtual machine in seconds themselves without intervention from us is something completely different than the Managed Services we deliver since 1997 through Cyso.
Launching a 100% online platform doesn’t take away the need for personal contact and continuous feedback. Ever since creating Fuga Cloud we took that into account. While being in bèta phase our early adaptors had the opportunity to experience our new service for free (by invitation). The feedback we received was essential to launch a product on the 25th of september 2015 that met the needs and expectations of our customers.
The power of Scrum
In order to quickly respond to feedback we had to change the way we took care of our everyday business. As a result we introduced the Scrum Framework in our organisation.
Scrum is an Agile way of working. An iterative way where we work in short cycles of 2 weeks (sprints) in which we transform the feedback of our customers into improvements to our services. Incoming feedback is read by the entire team and, if necessary, action will be taken immediately. The Daily Scrum stimulates this. On each day of a sprint the team holds a a short meeting (called the Daily Scrum) to determine whether the set goal for a sprint will be achieved and they inspect wether immediate action is necessary based on the feedback they received.
From feedback to a user story
User stories are being used to process feedback so that it is clear to the team which functionality we are going to create for our customers and what they try to achieve by using this functionality. This is therefore always described from the perspective of the customer. They typically follow a simple template: As a [type of user], I want [some goal] so that [some reason].
An example of a recently solved user story is the 4XL flavor we released two weeks ago. One of our customers informed us the 2XL flavor doesn’t meet his needs which resulted in this user story: As [customers’ name], I want a new flavor with more capacity than the current 2XL flavor, so that my application can use the resources it needs to run flawlessly.
In addition to this user story we added acceptance criteria. Acceptance criteria are story specific requirements that must be met for the story to be completed. In case of the example I just gave the acceptance criteria were:
- Make the new flavor technically available
- Show customers the availability of the new flavor on our website
- Set the right pricing for the new flavor
Inform customers about the availability of a new flavor Acceptance criteria are matched with the original feedback we receive from a customer. It helps us to validate the completed work.
Measuring Customer Satisfaction
By transforming feedback from our customers into user stories and resolving them as quickly as possible, we contribute (indirectly) to the success of our customers. Measuring customer satisfaction is an important indicator for us to determine whether we are on the right track. To measure this, we recently added the “Feedback” button you find on the right side of the Fuga dashboard. It’s an easy way to ask our customers about their experience with our services. A typical question to measure the satisfaction of your customers is: “How likely is it that you would recommend our services to a friend or colleague?”
The outcome results in a Net Promoter Score (NPS). Indirectly, a rating of 0 to 10 points is given through emoticons. The answers customers provide are classified by:
0 - 6 points: Detractors—unhappy customers who can hurt our brand through negative word-of-mouth 7 - 8 points: Passives—satisfied but indifferent customers who could be swayed by the competition 9 - 10 points: Promoters—loyal customers who will keep using our services and referring others
You want to turn every customer into a valuable ambassador. Enthusiastic users of Fuga Cloud are of unprecedented value and essential for us to enable further growth. We would really appreciate it if you would like to share your experience with our services via the “Feedback” button on the right (visible in our dashboard after logging in).
No improvement without feedback
As you can see, feedback (and actually doing something with it) is important to us. In fact, we have adapted Scrum to continuous improve our services and shorten the time-to-market. We really believe that an organisation can not get further when there is no interaction with their customers. “No improvement without feedback” is a mindset embraced by our team.
By using customer feedback on a daily basis to improve our product, we keep our customer engagement as high as possible. In addition, we will blog more frequently and post more videos to give you an insight into the development process of Fuga Cloud. Therefore, I’m very curious about your feedback on this blogpost. Use the thumbs up or thumbs down buttons below to share your opinion. Do you prefer to start a conversation with us directly about this blogpost or our services in general? Just click the “+” icon in the corner right below.
Also, please watch the video below and meet the team behind Fuga Cloud. We shot this video recently at the end of a very successful sprint and celebrated this with a lunch. In our opinion successes always need to be celebrated.
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