What Drives Zscaler’s World Class Net Promoter Score?

Software as a Service (SaaS) companies aspire to win and retain customers, and grow their business with recurring revenues from them. Very few of them are actually successful in doing it at scale. J J Watt famously remarked, “Success isn't owned. It's leased and rent is due every day.” This is spot-on if you are in the SaaS business. Customers need to see continuous value from your service – not just when you sold it to them. If you provide consistent and exceptional service, they become raving fans and promote your solution to others. 

An industry standard way to measure this is Net Promoter Score (NPS). You ask all your customers, “How likely are you to recommend this service to a friend or colleague?” Respondents are given a choice on a scale of 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely). Customers that respond with a 9 or 10 are considered as Promoters. Customers that respond with a number between 0 and 6 are considered Detractors. And customers that respond with a 7 or 8 are considered Passives. Passives are satisfied with your service but not happy enough to promote it. NPS score is calculated as the difference between the percentage of Promoters and percentage of Detractors. Passives don’t contribute to the score. If all customers gave you a 9 or 10, your NPS score is +100. If all customers gave you a score between 0 and 6, your NPS score is -100.

So, what is a good NPS Score? Retently’s 2020 NPS benchmark provides average NPS scores by industry. The average NPS score for SaaS is 30. Scores between 30 and 70 are considered good. Zscaler’s NPS sits at 76, a world-class metric. How did we get here? By following these seven common-sense principles.

Customer Happiness = Reality - Expectations

Many SaaS vendors promise the moon to customers pre-sale and implode post-sale. Setting realistic expectations based on actual capabilities and delivering results beyond what customers expect creates raving fans. At Zscaler, our marketing is based on reality. Our sales process is consultative, where we work closely with our customers to truly identify their pain points and address them. Our professional services team gets them deployed rapidly, with best practices, so they can realize value from their investment right away. Value has to be tangible and substantial. Many CXOs have thanked us publicly for helping them with their secure cloud transformation, which resulted in better security for their business, faster user experience for their employees and enormous cost savings.  

Service Reliability is the Heart of SaaS

If you run a mission critical service like Zscaler, it cannot go down. Period. Reliability issues are a dagger through the heart. If your heart stops working, it doesn’t matter how good you were, you are dead. At Zscaler, we invest heavily in our Reliability, Availability and Scalability (RAS) program. While traditional hardware and software companies often deploy their sharpest engineers on “hot new” features, and relegate “maintenance work” to others, at Zscaler, our best and brightest engineers are constantly innovating on RAS. It is part of our service DNA. RAS starts with strong foundational architecture for your service, and requires continuous investment to make it better. Architecture matters, and cannot be fixed down the road. If you have a legacy enterprise appliance mindset, it is very difficult to build and scale a service.

Helping Customers Even When it isn’t Your Problem

When you process over 100 Billion transactions daily, for over 5000 large global enterprises, running at Internet scale, you will run into issues from time to time. What matters is not what happens, but how you respond to it. Zscaler sits between all employees and destinations they go to. Three out of four times, when customers report an issue, it has nothing to do with Zscaler. The problem could be on the user’s machine, their Wi-Fi, their Internet connection or a problem with the site they are trying to access. Zscaler’s customer service operates with the assumption that all issues are Zscaler issues and it is our solemn duty to help our customers. In the past, customers had to work with their network and firewall vendors, loop in service providers and endpoint support and deal with finger pointing. With Zscaler, customers get a single true partner to work with.

Empowering the Frontline with Knowledge and Tools

How many times have you gotten on a customer service call and the agent says I will have to talk to my manager and escalate the issue? It’s frustrating, right? In today’s world, customers want their issues resolved right away. That can only happen if your frontline is empowered with product knowledge and you have tools and automation to make them efficient. It starts off with self-service in the product to reduce the need for customers to call you, to begin with. If they do reach out for help, your customer support team needs to be enabled with continuous, high-quality, hands-on training to help them. At Zscaler, our support teams work closely with engineering and cloud operations teams, often rotating through groups to get hands-on exposure. We consciously invest in role-based training programs to uplevel skills. We provide them with tools to reduce the need to escalate issues to subject matter experts and closely track time to resolution.

Engagement at Every Level with Your Customers

Customers work with many vendors but trust a handful of partners. You win a customer for life when you can transition from a being a SaaS vendor to a becoming a trusted SaaS partner. That requires engagement at every level. Transformative engagements start at the top. At Zscaler we engage with CXOs heavily. We prioritize a CIO call over an internal Board call. Our executive management team attends all our Customer Advisory meetings to listen and learn. Our account team works closely with our champions and economic buyers. Our Technical Account Management (TAM) team engages weekly with our customers’ operational teams to make sure the service is running flawlessly and help them with ongoing projects to extract more value from the service. Our Customer Success team engages with them as a true advocate and drives quarterly business reviews. Large organizations are complex and constantly shifting. It is important to stay engaged at all levels.

When in Doubt Follow the Golden Rule

Customers can be very demanding and sometimes unreasonable. When in doubt, apply the golden rule. What would you want if you were on the other end of the line? Having empathy for your customers goes a long way. They may be acting unreasonably because they may be under a lot of stress. Helping them out when they need you the most has a lasting impact, and creates raving fans for life. Plus, it gives you the benefit of doubt when you’ve screwed up.

When You Do Screw Up, Be Transparent and Fix It

Finally, there will be times when you screw up. It could be a service impact due to a bug or a more serious issue such as a data breach. It is important to quantify impact clearly and communicate with your customers. Without proper business impact analysis, detractors assume the sky has fallen and promoters become passives. Be crisp, data driven, and transparent about impact, and how you are going to fix it and prevent recurrence. Actions speak louder than words. Make sure you follow-up on remedial actions and proactively communicate back with your customers.

We have used these common sense principles at Zscaler to provide exceptional service to our customers. We call it Customer Obsession. It is a core Zscaler value and our NPS score reflects it. Our 120% net dollar retention rate is a testament to it.