Nutanix’s NPS Score: A Brand Committed to CX
by Sabrina Tessitore
Nutanix is a B2B tech company focused on cloud software and hyperconverged infrastructure, but customer experience (CX) is something of an obsession for the brand. Net Promoter Score is a metric Nutanix is committed to, working hard to continually improve their customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
It’s a strategy that’s paying off. Nutanix’s NPS score is one of the best in any industry.
In recent years, the brand has gone so far as to reduce their customer acquisition efforts and focus to improve the experience of those customers they have already. While we are yet to see the results for Nutanix, it’s a strategy that makes good business sense. Studies show that acquiring new customers can cost brands up to seven times more than retaining old ones.
So, what is Nutanix’s NPS? And how do they keep it so high? That’s what we explore here. But first, let’s recap what we mean by the Net Promoter System.
What is NPS?
Net Promoter Score is one of the most widely used systems for brands to track their customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. While there are other metrics out there to do this job—from CES to CSAT—NPS remains the most powerful metric for monitoring and improving customer loyalty.
That’s primarily because NPS is simple and scalable. Whether you have 20,000 customers like Nutanix, or 300 million daily users like Zoom, you can use NPS to get a pretty accurate picture of what your customers are thinking about your products or services.
NPS starts with the standard Net Promoter Score question:
On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?
The responses to this question reveal three types of customers:
Promoters. At the top of the scale (scoring 9 and 10) are the customers who are passionate about your brand. They are enthusiastic, loyal, and they’re best placed to make an impact on your bottom line through referrals and upselling.
Passives. Next, scoring 7-8, are your passive customers. They’re not passionate enough about their experience to make a huge impact, but nor are they going to spread negative word of mouth.
Detractors. Scoring anywhere between 0 and 6, your NPS detractors are those who are most likely to churn—and they’re at real risk of spreading negative word of mouth. It goes without saying that you want to keep your detractors to a minimum.
To find your overall NPS score, subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters, using this formula:
NPS Score = % of NPS promoters - % of detractors
So, if you had 30% promoters and 20% detractors, you would have an NPS score of 10 (even if the remaining half of your customers are passive).
Let’s see how Nutanix is doing.
What is Nutanix NPS Score?
Nutanix has an NPS score of 92. And, as of 2021, it has boasted this incredible score for six years in a row. That means that the overwhelming majority of Nutanix’s customers are promoters, while only a tiny proportion are detractors.
It seems incredible. But this bears out with what we know about how the brand performs in terms of customer experience. Here are some of Nutanix’s other CX achievements:
In 2021, TrustRadius awarded Nutanix with the Top Rated Award for Customer Support.
In January 2022, ASP Online named Nutanix among the Top Best Support Websites for the fourth time.
In 2020, the Customer Relationship Management Institute awarded Nutanix with the Northface award for World Class Excellence in Customer Service, for the eighth year in a row.
Nutanix’s NPS score is not just a fluke. Rather a commitment to customer satisfaction is deeply rooted into the whole organization.
Check out 38 other SaaS NPS scores in our article.
Is Nutanix’s NPS Score Considered Good?
Yes, Nutanix’s NPS score is considered good. In fact, it sits alongside the likes of Tesla’s NPS score as one of the highest in the world. According to CustomerGauge’s industry benchmarks, Nutanix performs twice as well as the average business in the IT industry.
According to the designers of the NPS score, anything above 0 is considered a good result. Simply, that shows that you have a higher number of promoters than detractors. Meanwhile, anything above 50 is considered a really strong performance.
This way, Nutanix’s NPS score of 92 is really on a different planet.
It’s Nutanix’s consistency that really underscores the brand’s quality. Typically, a brand may do a single NPS survey after a particular transaction and receive a great result. But to achieve a score of 92 over six years shows that Nutanix’s customer experience is exceptional, at every touchpoint and with every stakeholder in their account.
What are NPS Benchmarks?
Nutanix compares incredibly well to every business under the sun. But when calculating your NPS score, it’s important to be aware that not every industry should expect the same standards. Typically, while healthcare has a high average NPS performance, industries such as telecoms and software are much lower.
We collated NPS benchmarks from across different industries in our CustomerGauge annual NPS Benchmark report, to give you a sense of what NPS score you should be aiming for:
Yet there are two crucial best practices to remember when benchmarking your NPS:
Use your own benchmarks. Whatever the rest of your industry is doing, your best NPS benchmark to use is your own previous NPS scores. If you’re improving, you’re doing well (read more: What is a good NPS score?)
As David Sangster, COO at Nutanix, has written: “When we started our NPS program at Nutanix seven years ago, our score was more than 50 percent lower than it is today. By focusing on the small things, that score has risen to one of the highest in the industry.”
There’s no reason why it can’t work for you too.
Use revenue as a benchmark too. To get real insight from your NPS program, you need to link your CX performance to your revenue. Monetized NPS can help you do just that—by revealing the value of the accounts that are affecting your NPS score.
Find out more here: Monetized Net Promoter—Tying Revenue to NPS
How Does Nutanix’s NPS Score Compare to Other SaaS Companies?
According to the CustomerGauge benchmark report, the average NPS score for SaaS brands is 36.
Paypal NPS score: 65
Slack NPS score: 55
Adobe NPS score: 33
Nutanix Customer Loyalty: What Factors are Driving Nutanix’s NPS Score?
Nutanix is driven by its customer loyalty program. Here are five factors that are helping them achieve their NPS goals—and reduce customer churn.
Commitment to staff. Nutanix recognises that customer experience starts with employee experience. As a result, the company’s staff come first.
In fact, according to Deepak Chawla, VP of Worldwide Support at Nutanix, the company’s staff receive three times as much training as industry peers—in technical skills and people skills. Clearly that’s having an impact.
Automation. Part of Nutanix’s customer success is the way that the brand empowers its customers to solve their problems themselves. In this way, good tools and a strong support portal that receives heavy investment is a crucial part of Nutanix’s CX.
The wisdom of this approach is supported by data. Studies show that 67% of customers prefer to be empowered to solve their own problems.
Find out more: Why Customers Prefer Self-Service Support
Data-driven decisions. The brand’s CX decisions are driven by data. Customers who are likely to churn are identified so that customer success officers can quickly intervene.
Meanwhile, algorithms determine which are the most important bugs to fix, as well as which customers are most likely to buy new releases.
Simplicity and flexibility. Nutanix makes using its products really simple. The brand’s dashboard provides a complete 360-degree view of a customer’s entire software infrastructure, so they can receive easy actionable insights on issues from across their stack.
Similarly, customers are given flexibility and freedom of choice at every level. And to keep things simple, there’s a single licence that covers every specific customer preference.
Obsession with customer experience. Nutanix’s strategy is now less focused on increasing its customer count and more on delivering enhanced products and services to its existing customers. This means that the brand puts customer experience at the heart of everything it does.
Drive Your NPS Score with CustomerGauge
How can you monitor and boost your NPS score? CustomerGauge can help. Book a demo to find out how.
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