Reimagining customer experience at XtremeLabs

We began reimagining our customer experience in earnest in 2018. We expected a list of digital-transformation projects to move the needle. What actually moved it was four practices.

Define what "great" means. We borrowed a comparison from hospitality: front-desk staff who hand you your key and point you to the elevator are providing good service. Staff who walk you to the elevator and strike up a conversation along the way are providing great service. The difference is the extra effort, and it changed how our team approaches every support interaction - helping resolve an issue directly rather than just redirecting a user to their home institution or training company.

Empower the front line. We trust our team to resolve issues using their own judgment, even when that carries a cost, and asked them to escalate only the cases where their judgment says the answer to a customer should be no. That trust helped us resolve more than 98% of user issues on first contact.

Anticipate. We mine our own usage data and public forums for patterns, then get ahead of problems before a user hits them. One example: instructors often have only a weekend between training classes to prepare, so we build a profile of each lab in advance and share it with the instructor, flagging where students typically get stuck.

Measure and benchmark. We track Net Promoter Score(R) across both customers and our own team, combined into what we call the XtremeS score - a reminder that happy employees tend to produce happy customers. In Q1 2019, XtremeLabs' NPS(R) reached 47, against a software-and-apps industry average of 28 (Satmetrix) and a cross-industry average of 17 (SurveyMonkey's benchmark of 2,259 companies).