The Overlooked Evaluation Criteria: Customer Experience

by Brendon Macaraeg on June 19, 2020

Evaluating SaaS-based services for purchase is rarely a straightforward path: you’ll enter the research and product testing process with your stakeholders’ requirements and a checklist of “must-haves.” But expectations around each vendor’s capabilities can change as unknowns rear their heads. I know because I’ve been in the Evaluator’s Seat several times in my career.

But there’s a crucial factor in a purchase decision that sometimes gets overlooked during the evaluation process: customer experience.

Customer experience encompasses a vendor’s ability to provide a positive, holistic experience from Proof of Concept (POC) to sales negotiations through implementation and beyond. Customer support, while important, is not the only measure of how customers perceive a vendor’s effectiveness at providing service and support. In enterprise software and SaaS-based services, an overall positive customer experience boils down to one question:

Can the vendor not only resolve issues effectively but provide a customer experience that exceeds expectations?

Signal Sciences from inception has understood our customers’ web app security needs because our founders have been in our customers’ shoes. This in turn has resulted in a holistic approach to customer experience driven by both technical expertise and empathy.

The ability to effectively solve customer issues as they arise is part of our overall operational processes that ensure we provide a superior customer experience. In addition to our Customer Support team, our Professional Services experts work with customers to not only implement our protection technology but also act as advocates to help customers get the most security value from our web app and API protection platform.

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Enter Net Promoter Score: A Measure of Customer Satisfaction

So how do you measure the efficacy of a vendor’s customer experience?

The Net Promoter Score can be one key indicator. Created by Fred Reichheld, the founder of Bain & Company’s Loyalty Practice, Net Promoter Score (NPS) functions as a measurement of customer satisfaction at companies and organizations around the world. NPS is effectively a reflection of customer sentiment and whether or not customers will advocate on a vendor’s behalf. Measured on a scale of -100 to 100, an NPS score of 30 or higher is considered “good.”

Signal Sciences most recent customer survey resulted in a Net Promoter Score of 80+.

You read that correctly. We achieved an 80+ Net Promoter Score for technical efficacy and customer satisfaction. It’s even more striking when looking at other security vendors who score lower in the 30-50 range. Some legacy WAF vendors we compete with have rankings as low as -6. Though we are not in the same market, it’s worth noting that customer-focused brands like Netflix, Starbucks and Amazon score in the low 60s to high 70s. We’re clearly in good company in terms of exceeding customer expectations.

Our Customers Speak for Us: Gartner Peer Insights

In addition to our NPS score, you can hear from our customers via Gartner Peer Insights. If you’re not familiar with Gartner Peer Insights, it’s like Yelp but for enterprise software. With their unfiltered reviews, our customers provide examples of the outcomes of our superior holistic customer experience and technical approach to web app and API protection.

From C-level security stakeholders to directors of security, compliance and DevOps, our customers’ reviews have provided feedback resulting in Signal Sciences being:

The only five-out-of-five-stars rated next-gen WAF vendor
The only two-time winner of the Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice distinction

With a 98 percent recommendation rate, Signal Sciences is the highest-rated WAF among customers.

Why? It’s simple: we have an obsessive focus on ensuring our customers achieve their objectives when it comes to securing their apps, APIs and microservices. And when they engage with us, we provide an extremely positive, high value experience via our Customer Support and Professional Services staff.

While stats, scores, and distinctions do validate our focus on end-to-end customer experience, they can also be academic abstractions of what really matters: our team’s ability to partner with our customers to ensure their success. The following quote speaks directly to the end result that matters:

Signal Science’s support team is on-par with some of the best. Their personal approach and fast response times made us feel secure we made the right choice.
—Dax Lee, Chief Technology Officer, Winning Group

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