I can’t believe it has already been 90 days since I started at NetGain Technologies. It feels like just yesterday Jason Jacobson and I were announcing the transition to key stakeholders. These first few months have been a tremendous opportunity to listen and learn, primary focuses of mine in the early days. It has been incredible to get a sense of the history of the organization, meet some of the clients we serve, and witness the mission and values of the organization in action. When my tenure first began, one of my top priorities was building relationships among our employees and our clients. In this update, I will share a little more about how we are progressing on those fronts.
Employee relationships
On July 15th, my first day as CEO, I received an unbelievably warm welcome to the NetGain family. The culture of the organization was and continues to be one of my favorite things about working at NetGain. Shortly after joining, it became my mission to meet and start forming bonds with our great employee base.
This mission was fast-tracked in August as NetGain celebrated its 35th anniversary. Each year, NetGain hosts employee appreciation week, where each one of our offices enjoy a special event designed specifically to celebrate the team. This year, these events ranged from Top Golf to axe-throwing to cornhole tournaments just to name a few (check out pictures on our Facebook page). What I really enjoyed about the employee appreciation events was that they gave me the chance to understand our core values, visit each of our branch offices, meet many of our employees, and engage in some healthy competition.
In addition to the large celebrations during employee appreciation week, we also understand that our employees demonstrate actions aligned to our core values every day. In Q3 2019, the following people were recognized for embodying “The NetGain Way” (our core values).
- Graham Young
- Eric Mannon
- Terri Snider
- Wayne Logan
- Kevin Latiff
- Danny Campbell
- Mike McHale
- Trevor Nelson
- Nabeel Sawaf & Entire TRE Team
- Noah Fister
- Chris Bowmer
- Robert Patterson
- Scott Logan
- Tina Warner
- Braxton Molton
- Jason McRoberts
- Dustin Cook & Eric Fields
Finally, it is equally as important to recognize those employees not listed who go above and beyond each day in service of our mission. To all of our employees, we say thank you.
Client relationships
Before joining NetGain, I was struck by the customer-centricity of the company’s mission to create happy clients through effective managed services solutions. Particularly in a services business, the importance of client satisfaction cannot be overstated. As such, understanding current client satisfaction and generating meaningful client relationships were top of mind when I joined. Unsurprising given the mission of the company, NetGain utilizes multiple channels to solicit feedback from clients in order to measure satisfaction. Some examples of the feedback mechanisms are helpdesk satisfaction surveys, project satisfaction surveys, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and a National Advisory Council that meets twice a year.
In fact, we hosted seven of our National Advisory Council members two weeks ago for our semiannual meeting. During that two-day meeting, I benefitted greatly from the opportunity to listen to the insights, challenges, business goals, and successes that clients had experienced. There were several meaningful suggestions for improvement and takeaways generated during the meeting due in large part to the willingness of our clients to help us improve. We will continue to leverage in-person client feedback sessions including the National Advisory Council to help us better understand how we can best serve our clients.
Although the National Advisory Council consists only of a representative sample of our client base, I also learned that we call all our clients twice a year to comparatively measure their satisfaction using the net promoter score benchmark. Net promoter scoring essentially measures how willing survey respondents would be to recommend your services to another. Most recently, our client net promoter score was a 54. We take pride in these results as they are well above our industry average (24). That said, the team also performed a thorough analysis of all results to determine the common areas for improvement. Monitoring and analyzing at this level are critical to improvement, growth, and innovation. We will continue to set aggressive goals for client satisfaction metrics.
There is always room to improve and constantly act on the feedback we receive to create an exceptional client experience. Surveys, NPS, and national advisory council processes serve as channels for feedback to assure that we continue to drive improved customer satisfaction and success. We will continue to hold ourselves to the high standards required to achieve our mission.
Honors and Recognition in Q3 2019
Quarterly awards for outstanding team member efforts went to:
- Sales: Wayne Logan
- Finance and Administrative: Tina Warner
- Technology OneSource Engineering: Eric Mannon
- Professional Services: Terri Snider
- Tactical Operations: Anthony Mills
- Client Success: Deuce Towe
- Sales Support: Kevin Smith
The Future
The future of NetGain is bright. We have a wonderful group of individuals working together to service our client’s day and night. We have a continual focus on maintaining high levels of customer service and are always looking to the future to bring insights to our clients. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not specifically mention what a pleasure it has been to work with Jason Jacobson. Without Jason, and the other members of the Jacobson family who led NetGain over the course of the past thirty-five years, I would not be here today. Stay tuned for more big announcements in Q4 2019!
