AppDynamics has achieved a Net Promoter Score or NPS of 84 for the first half of its fiscal year.
The Net Promoter Score is the leading metric for measuring customer loyalty, representing customers' likelihood to recommend a company. First developed more than a decade ago, this single metric has been proven to highly correlate to actual customer behavior in terms of both loyalty to the company and likelihood to recommend it to others.
"Obviously, we're thrilled that our customers express such high satisfaction with their relationship with AppDynamics," said Hatim Shafique, chief customer success officer and senior VP of technical operations. "Especially at a time when AppDynamics has been experiencing triple-digit growth. To be able to grow our NPS score at the same time that we've been onboarding so many customers is a testimony to the 'Culture of Customer Centricity' that has driven us from day one."
AppDynamics more than quadrupled the average NPS score for the enterprise software category, which sits at 19. Publicly disclosed scores for competitors in the APM segment range from single- and low-double digits to roughly 50; none come within 30 points of AppDynamics' 84. AppDynamics' customer response rate was 37 percent for the nearly 400 surveys sent out, an especially high rate for a survey that offered no incentive for response.
"As exciting as this is, the NPS score is just the end result of everything we do," Shafique said. "There are 99 other things we do that are designed to help our customers succeed. The NPS score tells us that those things are working."
Shafique leads the customer success team at AppDynamics in a non-traditional customer care approach dubbed Customer Success 2.0, which flips the traditional service support model on its head. Instead of being viewed as a cost center emphasizing automated or low-skilled service, or a post-sales profit center focused on billable consultant hours, Customer Success 2.0 gives the customer one touch point who is accountable and invested in their success, and who stays with that customer for their entire lifecycle. These customer success and technical account managers are highly skilled, and many are experienced engineers.
The goal of Customer Success 2.0 is to get customers deployed as quickly as possible and successfully using the AppDynamics platform, and expanding its adoption throughout the organization. AppDynamics studies its customer patterns in detail, aggregating reams of data that characterize the customer's success with the product -- their adoption score, ticketing system outcomes, renewals, and an engagement score that includes product downloads, community and user group interaction, how actively they're configuring the product, and other measures of engagement.
"We have a secret weapon, a product we've built called Proactive," Shafique said, "that mines the data and does predictive analysis to tell us whether that customer is in good health or not. Then we can take the appropriate steps to give that customer what they need to succeed. That data also gives us a big picture across all our customers, showing us where they may be getting stuck in the deployment process, for example, so that we can then create the tools or the learning resources that will smooth that out. As much as we can, we try to give customers the means to get things done on their own, which is really what they want to do in the first place.
"That's quite a bit different than the model that starts by routing your call to an offshore call center, or the one that requires a high-priced consultant to be on your location for months at a time."
Ultimately, it is the company-wide culture where every person feels responsible for the customer experience that drives customer success, and hence satisfaction and a stellar NPS score, according to Shafique.
"The best thing about this NPS score is that it validates our approach," Shafique concludes. "If a customer is taking time out of their life to actually give you good feedback, if they believe in your product and are willing to recommend it, that says a lot. It says our strategy is working. It's great for our customers and it's helping to grow our business."
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