Here at Netreo, we not only try to offer a compelling and valuable set of products and services to attract new customers, we do everything we can to keep those customers happy once they’ve signed up for our services. By focusing on quality of service, and making automation simple and straightforward, we make it easy for our customers to extract value from their investment in our services from day one. We follow up with the best service we can deliver, and as much technical innovation as we can muster, to build on that value over time. Our metrics says this strategy is working: let us explain!
Here at Netreo, one of our explicit core philosophies can be described as “onshoring.” That is, we have deliberately decided to build and grow our development and support personnel inside the United States, and to house all of our operations and datacenters there, too. Onshoring has enabled us to attract and keep top talent at our Irvine, CA, headquarters and elsewhere in the USA in locations carefully chosen to ensure reliable, high-speed connections to the Internet core. That’s how we serve our customer base with highly reliable and highly available monitoring and management services and solutions.
In addition, careful acquisition of personnel has allowed our company to compile some noteworthy metrics for customer satisfaction and customer retention, as well as nurturing a well-informed and highly motivated workforce. Let’s take a look at some of those numbers, and what stands behind them:
In our 15 years of operation as a product and service provider, Netreo has retained over 24 out of every 25 of its customers acquired during that period. We believe this is no accident: it comes from a lot of careful planning, proactive employee training and development, and a can-do service mentality that routinely goes beyond the call of duty to make sure customers get the help and service that they need. In fact, we’re convinced that our devotion to service helps to explain why Netreo still counts its first three customers within the ranks of its current customer base – namely: Mitsubishi Motors, the Orange County Register, and WFS Financial (now Wells Fargo).
As measured by customer surveys, 92% of Netreo’s customers report themselves to be “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the service that we deliver to them. In an environment where our company must prove its worth to those customers on a day-to-day basis, this sheds more light on our customer retention history and our service-oriented culture. Because our customers subscribe to our services on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis, our customers have frequent and ample opportunities to opt out and go elsewhere. We think a high degree of customer satisfaction explains why they are inclined to stick with us. We also think our customer retention figures are also an outcome of our company’s onshoring approach, and our unswerving focus on attracting and developing top talent.
Over the decade-and-a-half we’ve been in business, Netreo has retained over 9 out of every 10 employees we’ve hired. This record comes from being very choosy about who gets hired, then training the heck out of our people, giving them ample opportunities to learn, grow, and advance, and offering excellent pay and benefits. Among our more unusual benefits, this includes a pair of plane tickets to anywhere in the world that employee might wish to travel, along with hotel accommodations and a bit of spending money on each employee’s 5 year anniversary. While it’s not the only reason why so many employees are still working for use, it’s often cited as a prized perk amongst our employee population.
Of course, we are convinced there’s ample method to this apparent madness. High employee retention is the master key to the other metrics we’ve collected, because employees make our sales and provide the service that supports our customers. At Netreo, we use a customer advocate system, where each customer is tied to a specific employee whose job it is to represent and stand up for their interests and needs. High employee retention means that our people know their customers, often very well. Netreo employees have a 5-6 year average tenure with the company, and the company does everything it can (above and beyond the 5-year sabbatical support) to make our employees enjoy and appreciate their jobs (and the customers who make those jobs possible).
While it remains a truism that “the numbers don’t lie,” the numbers in this case not only tell an interesting story, we also believe that they explain how Netreo has managed to survive and thrive in a crowded and competitive marketplace. It really does come back to offering a compelling and valuable set of products and services to our customers, and then making sure they realize that value with super service after the sale.
