Being #SoUnTelco sets us apart.
An article in the Harvard Business Review in *2003 . A long-haul flight.
That’s all it took to start our journey from ‘just another telco’ to who we are today.
Customer service has always been our priority, but it’s taken a while to figure out how to best deliver it. When Macquarie Technology Group co-founder and CEO David Tudehope first read about the NPS system on a flight from San Francisco, it sounded like a promising idea.
That was 14 years ago.
It was only four years ago that we realised we’d have to change everything about our business, our culture and our processes if we were serious about becoming the best in Australia. This meant ditching our annual 50-question customer survey and replacing it with a single question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) system measures customers’ response to this question and calculates an overall score between -100 and +100. By asking this question after each customer interaction, we suddenly gained access to valuable, real-time feedback that would change Macquarie Telecom in ways we couldn’t predict.
While the telco giants struggle to steer clear of negative scores, our rolling average for the past three months sits around +66.
That’s the highest score of any telco in Australia—and it’s no accident.
Today, NPS is at the core of our business. That’s why we display our live NPS results on our website. Unorthodox? Yes. Meaningful? Without a doubt. Customer satisfaction is something we want to be transparent about. And it’s something we want to be held accountable for, too. Sharing our NPS doesn’t just show that we’re serious about customer service—it also drives us to do better.
As well as changing how we measure customer satisfaction, we also had to rethink our customer service. Although offshore call centres are what Australians have come to expect, we believe that our customers deserve more. So we decided to give more.
In 2010 we opened our first Australian-based contact centre, right here in Sydney.
The benefits of this were twofold. Firstly, we were able to provide 40 bright minds with valuable training and experience in the tech industry. Secondly, we can now offer customers 24/7 access to an awesome team of local support staff. And we think that’s pretty great.
While it’s important to be attentive, we also need to be competitive. That’s why we’ve reduced costs and streamlined services for an unbeatable telco experience.
We believe that Macquarie Telecom combines the personality of a small company with the perks of a large one. Despite our size, we remain highly competitive with Telstra. What’s more, our industry-leading online tools allow customers to monitor their usage and reduce costs even further.
The latest step in our journey has been fine-tuning how we deliver our services.
Since launching separate units (Telecom, Cloud Services and Government) in 2016, Macquarie Technology Group has become even more responsive to client needs. Here at Macquarie Telecom, this means business-grade networks, state-of-the-art data centres, and dedicated teams of locally based support staff.
The result of all this change? Better services, satisfied customers, and a head-turning Net Promoter Score.
Although getting to where we are today hasn’t been easy, it’s definitely been worthwhile. As our WA State Manager, Aaron Tighe, says: “Everything we do is to help make our customers’ lives easier.”
*’The One Number You Need to Grow’ first appear in the Harvard Business Review in December 2003 and was later published on hbr.org