NetApp is working hard every day to improve the customer experience. And it’s working.

At NetApp, our goal is to deliver a single clear and consistent customer experience across our products, services, and technologies, from on-premises to hybrid to cloud environments. We strive to maximize speed and responsiveness at every touchpoint, with minimal friction—from first contact to evaluation and purchase through deployment, use, support, and refresh.

How do we continuously improve the customer experience? We evaluate multiple sources of customer data, then listen, evaluate, and take action. Every change we make is targeted to increase satisfaction with our products and support.

How do we measure customer satisfaction? (Hint: It goes way beyond NPS.)

Net promoter score (NPS) is a widely used market research metric; it typically takes the form of a single question asking respondents to rate the likelihood that they would recommend a company, product, or service to a friend or colleague. While important, NPS lacks context and can be manipulated by small sample sizes. NetApp goes way beyond high NPS numbers. We measure more than 50 different aspects of the NetApp brand, and delve just as deeply into customers’ impressions of our products, support, and services. This comprehensive approach drives action that actually makes a difference. Some companies may boast of 1,000 NPS responses—but we have more than 20,000 NetApp customers actively engaged in our customer experience programs, from surveys and interviews to customer experience communities, advisory boards, and panels.

How we’ve improved the NetApp customer experience.

When it comes to customer experience, we collect data from a range of sources, then turn it into insight and action with a simple but powerful three-step process.

NetApp Customer Experience Improvement Advantage

NetApp

Step 1. Collect data

We conduct regular customer surveys, but that’s just one kind of data we gather. We also rely on product telemetry, processing more that 250 billion data points a day with NetApp® Active IQ® Digital Advisor. NetApp services and support engineers engage with customers who bring a wealth of information and ideas into the mix. Combining so many data sources gives us a rich understanding of how customers use our products, including their experiences at each stage.

Step 2. Drive insights

We organize all this data, refine our metrics, and apply machine learning and artificial intelligence for advanced insights. Active IQ AI provides proactive insights, guidance, and actions that improve system availability, security, and performance. We also use a leading CX analytics platform to scale our understanding of the customer experience and leverage data with on-demand capabilities, deeper learning, and predictive analytics, speeding time from feedback to action.

Step 3. Improve products and services

Insights are shared with our marketing, sales, and engineering teams, who then make changes designed to improve the customer experience—whether the customer is learning about the brand, signing a contract, or engaging with us for support.

Customer satisfaction scores are up. Way up.

NetApp has been hard at work improving our customer experience. The highlight reel:

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Simplifying NetApp® ONTAP® software has increased satisfaction for three years running.

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We’ve simplified and improved the customer experience.

Some ways we’ve made it easier for partners and customers to buy, deploy, and use NetApp products and services:

Purchase, support, renew

• We’ve made it easier for partners to configure and price a system, so customers can get quotes more quickly.
• A one-page summary quote makes for easier understanding and dialogue around contracts.
• Flat and predictable support pricing helps customers plan total cost of ownership, including the renewal period.
• Our digital SupportEdge Advisor enhances support and makes recommendations to proactively manage system health.
• NetApp Keystone offers as-a-service models and flexible payment plans.

 Deploy

• You can set up Cloud Data Services and Cloud Volumes ONTAP Disaster Recovery in the cloud in just three clicks. That’s less than five minutes to set up a hybrid cloud environment that makes it easy to replicate on-premises data in the cloud, monitor it for compliance and privacy, and secure it with automatic encryption.

Use

• One-click problem resolution means that users can proactively resolve issues by boosting availability of installed systems with—yep—one click. The secret is using Active IQ Ansible playbooks to customize automation and deployment of scripts on storage systems to correct configuration, performance, capacity, and security issues.
• We automate performance, security, and capacity monitoring to keep problems to a minimum. Active IQ uses telemetry from systems to automatically monitor, detect, and (when necessary) mitigate system issues. And predictive wellness capabilities can identify and resolve many issues long before they become critical.

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We’re committed to customer satisfaction.

“NetApp is a standout example of a technology company wholeheartedly committing to CX as a cultural and operating imperative,” said Gerry Brown, research director of European CX at IDC. “Corporations can learn much from its innovative approach to building CX capabilities into a significant strategic advantage.” Read the full IDC perspective report on NetApp’s Customer Experience Office here.

At NetApp, we’re committed to delivering industry-leading customer experience and improving our customer satisfaction scores. Overall product satisfaction is holding steady at 90%, while 86% of customers say they find NetApp easy to do business with. We bring together feedback from over 20,000 customers with product telemetry and the input of our knowledgeable service and support techs, painting a detailed picture of what our customers experience and how we can serve them better. We use these insights to help us make important changes and simplify how we market, sell, and develop products and services while increasing customer satisfaction. The process is working—and we’ll continue to deliver on our commitment to customer satisfaction every step of the way.