I hinted in my Christmas letter that we’d had some amazing responses to our non-survey survey. The survey is still open if you intended to respond but didn’t, but we’ve had enough responses to draw some clear conclusions. I want to say a huge personal “thank you” to everyone who took the time and effort to respond, I really appreciate it. It is fair to say the results were polarised, from an extremely positive majority through to a quite venomous minority. The former brought a tear to my eye but it is clear we can learn a lot from those we’re falling short by. I’m delighted that absolutely nobody was “on the fence” – we don’t do beige and it seems neither do you.
The overriding theme in the results was a strong trust in our technology and reliability, with that scoring an NPS (Net Promoter Score) of 85. NPS is not an “out of” score but a ratio of promoters to detractors. Apple is cited at 61 and telecoms 30ish so by any measure this is outstanding. We had zero detractors for reliability, even amongst those who were otherwise pretty negative, which I’m really really pleased with. This did drive some surprising but at the same time obvious outcomes, however – only 50% of respondents were aware of our 100% SLA on Carrier Services, with 25x credits. That makes sense as it was last relevant in 2018, and it is clear why precisely none of our competitors have come anywhere near matching this, but we need to make more people aware.
Similarly our scores for call quality and latency were outstanding – NPS of 89.5 – we’re clearly winning on the objective logical things we’ve sought to optimise for. APIs, fraud controls, and automation were all up there too which is great to see. However, whilst affirmative and something I’m grateful for, this exercise was about finding those less-logical factors and the feelings out there because my spidey-senses tell me that is where we can do better.
In those areas you’ve given us several areas to improve and a few where we simply need to disagree. Several respondents talked about “price increases” which was fascinating because there haven’t been any! I suppose we have introduced a minimum spend to the Hosted platform, but at such a low level it shouldn’t affect growing customers. There was some talk of us introducing porting export charges (in-line with the resort of the industry) as one-side of a coin we view as two-sided – we simultaneously introduced 75% discounts on imports for automation. What is perceived by some as a price increase is actually a conscious reduction of revenue on aggregate but you’ll have to take my word on that. Clearly free porting in every direction, no minimum spends and special pricing for every new customer you win, would curry favour with a few but I’m afraid that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny in a wider context and simply wouldn’t be fair. We’re intentionally commercially inflexible at the lower-spending end of things which I maintain enables us to offer better and fairer value to all – I’ve never liked discounting on a “who shouts loudest” basis, and I don’t really fancy multiplying pricing for the many in order to discount selectively for the few. We’re incredibly flexible on rates, increments, minimums, credit-terms where the opportunity justifies all our time being so, remembering our pricing is likely a fraction of yours and our margins are wafer thin. Custom terms equate maintenance overhead which is a cost that has to pop out somewhere; standard terms equate no overhead and savings for all, which is the model we’ve adopted for spends below about £10k a month.
One aspect of that which made me sad though came from some of the more balanced responses. This cohort was generally aligned with what we’re trying to be, but felt we were sending a signal that they were too small now. We need to work on that because it couldn’t be further from the truth. In discussing responses internally, I can relay the history of most of these relationships, products they built on Simwood back 10+ years ago in some cases that they might not even know I heard about and celebrated. Charles can do the same with Hosted customers on Sipcentric. They’ve been with us a long time, we treasure them, yet they feel unloved. How they feel cannot be “wrong”, and establishing it was the object of this exercise but it is so far from how we regard these customers internally, we need to right it. That is in part a function of beefing up our account management responsiveness and ability to make a decision, but also signalling. Our biggest customers started as start-ups, and innovative people building cool things is what inspires us, so this cohort really couldn’t be more important to us.
On embarking on this exercise I wanted to understand how, looking at two competitors, one can’t keep their network up a week in a row, and another is 15 years behind the curve, yet they both survive and one of them grows. How can that be in an efficient market of rational actors? Putting aside industry quirks such as wholesale porting, the answer as I expected isn’t in reliability, uptime, or technical excellence, it is in feelings – the irrational. It turns out you can have a platform which is up and down like a whore’s knickers, if your customers love you. We’ll forgive anything from those we love, although there may be elements of Stockholm Syndrome there. It turns out as well that you can be well behind the curve if you buy lots of lunch and drinks for the people who sell your solutions and they’re your mates. That is perhaps an over-simplification of a complex set of emotions, but far and away the biggest takeaway – all our customers need to know we love them, and we need to show it more.
This gets even more fascinating when you combine those feelings with the logical and objective measures like reliability. You’d think they would foster loyalty, and in most cases they do, but amongst those with negative feelings, it was clear they actually foster resentment – perhaps resentment that there isn’t an alternative and they feel trapped. Management consultants would call that a win but I don’t want customers feeling trapped because competitors are incompetent, I want them loving what we do and feeling we’re proper partners in their success, regardless of competitors.
Another theme was one of expectation. Customers who have used other providers love our APIs and automation, almost proportionally to the extent they used alternatives before discovering us. They recognise the pain we’re saving them from around porting etc. and the costs our APIs save. Others, who in some cases launched on Simwood, have no idea and view us against a theoretical absolute of how things should work, against which we of course fall short. One resented us building new “toy” features before “getting the basics right”. Others, who have positively raised feature requests in our Community Slack (something else you appreciate) and had them delivered want more more more when it comes to automation and recognise the uniqueness in what we’re offering and enabling them to build.
There was some fair criticism around documentation. We’re working on that already but some of the feedback is related to new features (BYoC, WhatsApp, Teams, porting automation etc.). This is a difficult balance because we (read: I) put a lot of pressure on developers to get new features in customer’s hands. We want you to be able to play and build as early as possible, to give you as much runway as possible and, honestly, so you can give us feedback which in some cases shapes the evolution of the product. We view this as us working together, but some of you view this simply as an unfinished product. While documentation might be lacking (or hopefully just lagging), there’s generally videos demoing use (in our SimCron Podcast or freestanding) or blog posts doing the same, and our portal is 100% built on the API so some of you are pretty self-sufficient at reverse engineering. There is perhaps an argument for us to release more, later, catering for a less techy audience than we’re used to, or making beta access more exclusive and conditional. It is something we’re still mulling over and ideas are welcome.
I was delighted at some of the warm comments about our team, especially support responsiveness. To be honest that was a pleasant surprise and hats off to Jakob leading that team, and Sonny (ably filling Vicky’s big shoes while she embarks on motherhood) in porting. We’ve got some great people who I really appreciate and it is very clear your feelings towards us are proportional to your exposure to them. An API gets the job done and will always be our go-to, but you’ll never appreciate an API for helping you out – humans like dealing with humans and the more we automate, the more important the humans become. Perversely, the less competitors automate and simplify things, the more human contact they get with you and that matters. We clearly need to do both.
Overall, while it is my nature to focus on the things that need fixing, this was an incredibly positive response. When asked for three words to describe Simwood, ~45% of respondents used words around reliability and stability, while ~40% used words around professionalism and quality, with innovation and technical leadership bringing up number three. When asked to select from a list of our strengths, the trend was more clear – 90% put reliability/uptime first, including the respondent for whom this was the only positive answer, 75% selected call quality and 70% API/automation. You appreciated our transparency and values and, as I just mentioned, our people – 55% ranking support responsiveness as a strength. All music to any founder’s ears, but I won’t be ignoring the less positive comments – the lessons to learn around human relationships and every customer knowing how much we value them (except where their expectation is we compromise on what we stand for, e.g. get lax on compliance).
Those are the nuggets I really hoped to get from this exercise so: thank you again.
