Last week, Cuckoo held its first ever mini-hackathon at our offices in London's lively East End. For a number of us who only joined recently, myself included, it was also the first time we’d met in person. Heck it was the furthest I’d travelled since pre-Corona!

For those not familiar with hackathons, they’re a chance for teams to explore and quickly implement product ideas without the usual constraints of professional software development. Think dancer or guitarist free-styling, but nowhere near as jazzy.

Customers are at the centre of all decisions at Cuckoo, as we look to redefine what people can expect from their broadband provider. So we kicked things off with an ideation session focussed around the different stages in our customer journey. Each equipped with a fresh pack of sticky notes and a trusted Sharpie, we got to work letting our creative thoughts flow.

It wasn’t long before we had a wall full of ideas to talk through, and we discussed the merits of each one. The team were in good spirits and everyone contributed some brilliant ideas for how we could improve Cuckoo. Alas we had to settle on one, so we picked a short-term customer delight moment that was fun and we felt would bring a cheeky smile to our customers' faces.

After picking up some lunch at nearby Spitalfields Market, we had just a few hours left to crack something out so we got straight to it. The idea we’d chosen was based around making our sign-up process more memorable, by celebrating that moment when a new customer joins us. Our plan involved some special effects which required professional sound equipment. Fortunately our office has a recording studio as standard, so we were well placed.

While Tommy and Leanne worked on design and sound, the developers got to work on installing the special effects on the sign-up confirmation page. Hackathons really are a great way for teams to bond.

With a few minutes to spare before we had to set off for our trains, we managed to get a working demo of the idea we’d envisioned - success! We hope that the feature we’ve added tickles you a little, just as it did us while we were building it. If you’ve made it this far I’m sure the suspense is killing you. You'll need to join Cuckoo to hear it in all its glory, but I can show you. So all that’s left to say is, let’s celebrate...

If you’d like to help us redefine what people can expect from their broadband provider, we’re hiring for a number of positions at the moment. Go check them out!

Cuckoo Hackathon - June '21

One sunny afternoon, the team got together and built a new feature to make our customers smile.

So here we go with this month’s update:️

As always, our tech team has been pretty busy.

We thought we’d share a few things they’ve been up to:

• No more passwords - you’ll no longer have to waste time working out which of your many passwords you chose for your Cuckoo account. Now you can sign in instantly using a one-time ‘magic link’ which we email over to you. It’s safer too 🔒

• Sharing your Wi-Fi - we’re now enjoying the novelty of other people in our homes, and these people sometimes want to use Wi-Fi. So we’ve made this super easy. You can share your Wi-Fi password via WhatsApp. Just head over to My Account and click the button

• Updating your email address - after hundreds of requests for this feature, it now exists! If you want to change the email we have registered for you, then you can do this yourself in My Account

And if you want to hear a bit more about all things tech, have a read of their full update.

There was an unfortunate incident involving a puppy and an internet cable.

Lyra the puppy ate through the cable, leaving one of our customers without internet for days. Impressively, they managed to patch up the cable themselves.

Hopefully this time Lyra will leave it alone!

Find out what we've been up to this month, as well as what went down with a puppy & an internet cable.

Monthly newsletter - June 2021

We’re making broadband simple, for good. We’re simple because we have only one deal, one price, one speed and a one-month rolling contract. We’re good because you don’t need to barter to get a fair price and via the Cuckoo Compass we give 1% of monthly bills to get people in need onto the internet.

87% of our reviews are five stars, as of today. How have we managed this given we’ve only launched this year? Keep it simple. You choose your switch date, pick your own Wi-Fi details, receive your router, connect, then never have to speak to us. No annual contract bartering, no price hikes and no issues. For a small percentage of people, they do need our help. So this blog is about how we help.

I’m Oliver, Cuckoo’s Head of Service. I used to work for Uber and Amazon so know a thing or two about delivering on time. Prior to joining Cuckoo, I drove my car to Venice and back, kayaking around lakes, rivers and beaches. I stumbled upon Cuckoo when preparing for my annual contract barter with BT! I joined the team hoping to fix the many problems of the broadband industry.

“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

Why have I started with a poem? Well, more than 95% of our customers follow the same, happy, well-trodden path. They connect on time and browse their internet with no issues. We’ve worked (and continue to work) hard on making this a great experience. But when a small percentage of our customers fall off of this happy path, it can become troublesome.

Openreach provisioning delays pushing switch dates out by several weeks to carry out unplanned maintenance; orders getting stuck, requesting Openreach to clear the system issue, or Openreach merely adding one day to a wait. One of the big risks we face as a business is that we have to take (and own) responsibility for anything that can happen in the network layers below us. Royal Mail may even leave your router in a barbecue…

Once you’ve gone live, what can go wrong then? Again a small percentage of customers can have network issues. This can be due to many things:

Loose cables or water damage causing electrical currents to surge on the line, knocking your download speeds from 80Mbps to 1Mbps instantaneously.

Unplanned exchange point outages impacting thousands of properties for several hours.

A car crash in Brixton that destroys the green PCP cabinet, along with the cables of 388 homes serviced by this box.

These are all genuine issues that we have encountered. Out of the small percentage of customers that need assistance, a larger part of Cuckoo’s customer contacts relate to provisioning or faults that require third party engineers to resolve, this is something we need to get right. Our Trustpilot review has so far, only primarily been lowered by those customers who have had one of these experiences. We also cannot necessarily challenge their low rating, as any loss of internet or fault is annoying, no matter how quickly we can resolve this. We’ll get onto how this informs our principles later.

60% contacts solved on first response 🥇

3% of contacts via the phone for cuckoo 🏎

59 Net Promoter Score (measure of happiness)

So what are the learnings from these stats? Well, making sure the 40% of contacts we can’t solve the first time, actually get solved super fast and clearly. For example, we share detailed internet outage or diagnostic results; update our website within minutes of feedback (e.g. when a customer questions what something means in the signup flow); add tech features based on needs, such as scheduled switches, static IP addresses or new line installs. For those we cannot help upon first contact, these are predominantly resolved within 24 hours of initial contact. Given our small and agile team, our product innovation rate is blisteringly fast. Take for example scheduled switches, we got the idea on a Wednesday, designed it on a Thursday and coded it on a Friday. Lovely jubbly.

The whole team is also trained on customer service. Customers are ultimately the voice through which we can innovate on our product. So the closer to the ground we all are, the better. It helps us to collectively make decisions based on real life examples we have encountered as well as issues we think may arise based on existing contacts.

What does the process flow for a normal customer contacting us look like? It usually takes us <10 minutes to pinpoint the issue (we want to make this process much faster). We then run three different tests on their line. This is on the broadband part, the landline part and then a joint test. We can then escalate issues to Openreach engineers to fix. In an ideal situation, we would be able to see a fault (or engineering works on the line) and raise an issue to Openreach proactively, letting our customers know before they even need to contact us.

If we are unable to see the fault, we then have to troubleshoot with the customer, asking a series of questions, some of which are quite technical. This adds on average 3–4 customer responses, requiring time out of their day and ours.

In order to keep our performance up and train the next wave of Cuckoo’s customer service team, we need a plan.

Transparency. We will share engineer notes with the customer and translate the jargon into a sentence that even someone with no knowledge of the internet would understand. If it is our fault, we will apologise and if it is not, we will identify what the problem is, how and when we plan to fix it.

Persistence. If you are saying there is an issue, we are going to chase this. If we haven’t received a response from Openreach, we will chase before the customer needs to. We will act as concierge throughout any issue or request.

Speed. If the customer contacts us, we want every piece of information available instantly to see the issue so that we can respond as soon as possible. We want to raise faults to Openreach as soon as possible and update our website, tools and tech based as soon as possible. In future, we should be able to let the customer know of the issue before they need to contact us.

We want to expand our lead over the incumbents. The only way we’ll do that is by innovating further and faster. These are all going into our product roadmap for the future.

Diagnostic Automation — We are designing a support hub for customers to run their own tests. If any of the tests fail, this will raise a request for Openreach to investigate this. This will be accessible on both mobile data and our broadband connection — if the internet has gone off, you can run tests from your phone. We will also want to develop an app soon.

Router Automation — Through remote management, we will show users helpful router settings and details on their Cuckoo accounts. We cannot expect customers to log in to the GUI and run trace route tests or update settings (for all you broadband nerds).

Fault Automation — We’ll identify when the customer's router drops below a set speed threshold or goes offline for longer than 10 minutes, then complete diagnostic tests automatically. This could notify us and the customer so we can book an engineer at the soonest convenience. Let's get the problem fixed before the customer even thinks to contact us for help.

Awesome service tools — Should the customer want our help, our customer service team will have all details and actions on one page. No “please hold” or “let me transfer you to the right team”. We will have tools that show diagnostics, account details, connection details, router details and all of the customer payments and correspondence in one place. Every customer service associate will be able to handle every contact type as the tool will provide all information to the relevant question.

Publish our results — We’ll let everyone know how fast we respond to certain issues, our performance and show customer satisfaction throughout our site.

Known Unknowns — Continuous improvement will see new contacts or new issues escalated by customer services; they will raise it with the relevant team, who shall design, develop and deploy code to automate or fix the issue.

Using our already strong (and ever-expanding) team, we will be able to build the tool of all tools — internally developed tools that will be tailored to our industry. Our customer service team will be a strong, multi-disciplinary team who will be able to handle every contact type. We do not want to have to pass customers around to countless teams who are “specialised” within certain domains. The team will remain honest, stating where the problem lies, who is at fault and what happens from there.

This is our plan to be the best-rated and most loved broadband provider in the country. The challenge now will be to improve as we scale!

The best utility company is one that you do not notice. They just work.
Cuckoo customer research, October 2020

Why do our customers like us?

When it comes to pricing, the current crop of providers aren’t doing a great job. This isn’t just me saying so: criticism has come from, among others, the likes of The Times, The Daily Mail, The Mirror, The Daily Star, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun, The Guardian… unanimous support across the press spectrum that politicians could only dream of. In short, the broadband market all too often reflects a broken, oligopolistic market.

First of all, anyone who’s gone on a broadband website will know that there are a ridiculously large number of deal options. TalkTalk, for example, have five different deals on their website: Faster Fibre, Superfast Fibre, Faster 150 Fibre, Fast Broadband and Ultra Fibre Optic. That’s before you get onto their call packages (Unlimited UK Calls or International Max), TV options (would you like TalkTalk TV, TalkTalk TV Box, TalkTalk TV Plus Box, TalkTalk TV multi-room, TV Select, TV Entertainment, TV Kids, or Sky Cinema) and choosing between the Super Router and All new Wi-Fi Hub. By my calculation that’s 360(!) different potential combinations of deals. No wonder we find it hard picking the right one for us.

But even when looking at a single deal, prices are opaque and difficult to understand. In a study by the Advertising Standards Authority, only 23% of individuals were able to correctly identify the total cost per month of a broadband deal when looking at an ad for the first time. The vast majority were left confused and misled. It’s no wonder that we end up on expensive and complex contracts.

Ofcom estimate that 8.8 million households in the UK are paying around £100 per year more than they should. Why? Simply because they got to the end of their contract and trusted that their provider would give them a fair deal. Instead, the vast majority of current providers hike prices at a contract’s end. It’s a tax on loyalty. At the time of writing, the infamous leader of the pack is Virgin Media’s M50 tariff, which increases by a whopping £192 per year after 12 months. In terms of relative increase, the winner is Post Office’s 11Mbps package, which increases by 67% 12 months in. Lovely.

Every day 25,000 broadband customers come to the end of their contract — and the majority of those see an automatic price rise.

Some plucky individuals will read the above and decide to raise it with their provider. Good luck to you. Negotiating a new deal is protracted, complex and painful. First, you might have to navigate your provider’s website to even find a way to contact them — no mean feat, since many providers make it as difficult to get in touch as possible. Then, having waited in a call queue for an hour or so, be prepared to listen to various explanations as to why you, as a loyal customer, are not allowed to receive anywhere near the same deal as new shiny customers who want to join for the first time. You may then generously be offered a pound or two off your current price, still likely far more expensive than introductory offers.

Perhaps instead you need to leave your contract early. There can be valid reasons; we get that people’s plans change. But most providers don’t agree, and instead charge exorbitant fees if you need to leave — far above what anyone could consider reasonable. Our CEO’s dad was trying to leave BT and was threatened with a £400 fine for ending his contract early. Want to challenge the fine? See above.

Thankfully, we are seeing progress. In the past Ofcom have fined EE and Virgin Media millions for levying excessive charges to customers who ended their contracts early. And Ofcom are now requiring companies to tell customers about their best deals when they reach the end of their contract. At least, they were just about to - until Coronavirus hit and they decided to delay enforcement.

senior executive at a top 5 UK ISP, May 2020

“We know charging loyal customers more is unfair and not nice, but we make billions from it. It’s a battle between the commercial and strategic arms of the business”

But we think that change is always best when it comes from the industry itself. From the bottom-up. It shouldn’t be the regulators job to require us to treat paying customers with respect.

And so when we set up Cuckoo, we wanted its approach to be distinctive. Refreshingly distinctive. But what exactly would that look like?

We started by setting out the overarching principles that should shape our approach to pricing. These, we resolved, would guide how, what and when we charged our customers.

Be clear. Our customers should know what they’re paying each month, and why. And next month. And the month after that. They shouldn’t be surprised at additional charges or jumps in the price. And they shouldn’t have to wade through dozens of different deals before joining us. Most people just want fast internet that works — and so that’s what we’ll give them.

Be reasonable. We don’t want to take advantage of customers whose plans change for reasons outside their control. Our business model shouldn’t rely on a bunch of customers not noticing or challenging excessive charges. We want people to understand why they pay what they they pay at every stage of the journey with us.

Reward loyalty. Customers that stick with us should be thanked, not exploited. At the very least, they should never get a worse deal than our newer customers; at best, they should be rewarded for being a committed customer.

… And be financially viable. Okay, this one might not be quite as exciting or revolutionary. But at the end of the day, if we don’t cover our costs we won’t be able to keep providing our service. Which doesn’t help anyone. So we’ll aim for a business model that is both sustainable (see our legal duty below) and fair — where each customer pays what they should, and not where a pool of loyal customers cross-subsidise those who like switching onto new contracts. (The incumbents have a euphemism for this — it’s called back-book front-book cross-subsidisation. Catchy.)

These principles provided our framework. But to get to the specific details, we needed to reach out to our customer base.

First, we Cuckoo Community and tested our pricing ideas directly with members of the public. This was great. It wasn’t easy — several people said we needed to rethink our approach. But that was exactly the feedback we needed as we refined our proposition. We got a bunch of ideas that we hadn’t considered, and we got a sense of what people cared about most.

Second, we ran a survey. We tested a bunch of price points against our competitors’ offerings with a group of about 1000. This was costly but it was a great way of getting some aggregated feedback to complement our individual verbatim thoughts from the Community.

“24% of people are more likely to change broadband provider due to Coronavirus”

Third, we built a financial model. We needed to work out what would be sustainable in the long-run under what assumptions, and test different scenarios. This helped us really get to the final answer and manage the trade-off between affordability, financial sustainability and quality of service.

That was our approach. And here’s what we’ve come up with.

One fast speed. One month rolling. No end of contract price rises.

You’ll pay £29.99 each month for your broadband. No fixed contract length; no post-contract loyalty tax. And only one deal (much like Bulb having one tariff). We might need to increase prices in line with inflation in future years (we’ll try not to!), but if it does, it will increase by the same amount for everyone. This monthly price was originally going to be higher, but feedback from our community adjusted this price!

And a £60 connection cost. We thought hard about this. We know that an upfront cost might put off some customers. However, each time someone joins our network we need to pay Openreach about £60 to switch them over; and we’d rather be transparent about that rather than tying you into a long contract. An upfront cost has proved manageable and successful at other companies — like ByMiles. What’s more, we hope to allow you to spread out your upfront cost over time via Klarna. We also buy you a good quality router — but we’ll give that to you for free as long as you send it back to us if you leave 😢.

What’s more, we’ll introduce a loyalty bonus. We commit to rewarding our most loyal customers — those who stay with us for many years. The longer you stay, the price will go down. Being entirely transparent, we need to monitor our financials and churn rates over the coming year before confirming the exact details and the size of our loyalty bonus; but watch this space.

But… our approach isn’t set in stone. This is our best attempt off the back of the work we’ve done and a few weeks of being live. To pivot, is to startup.

Think there’s a better approach? Great. Tell us. 🔊 We’d love to hear what you think, and consider whether it works for us. Contact us at hello@cuckoo.co or join the conversation on Twitter.

Cuckoo Hackathon - June '21

More from Cuckoo

Monthly newsletter - June 2021

Why do our customers like us?

How to disrupt a £12bn industry; the Cuckoo pricing story

How fast can you go?