Every 6 months MoneySavingExpert launch a national poll asking customers "How do you rate your broadband provider on service?". For the second time running Cuckoo has come out on top.

You can view the official results of the national poll on MoneySavingExpert.

The whole team at Cuckoo want to give a big thanks to all our flock (our loyal customers) that voted. THANK YOU! 💛

Cuckoo voted top for customer service on Money Saving Expert

In a national poll of over 20,000 respondents we have scored 9.7/10 for customer service by our customers.

Working for a startup means that everyday is different. Typically my day involves answering customer queries and troubleshooting faults. The first chunk of my day I spend working through emails and liaising with our network provider to make sure that any customers with connection issues are back up and running as soon as possible.

My afternoons are spent balancing emails and calls from our customers and answering any queries they may have. These range from “How can I pay my bill?” To “I’ve accidentally cut my phone line, help!”

On-top of my typical duties I often take part in different training sessions. This is one of my favourite things about the role as it means I am constantly improving my knowledge and skills. Training involves anything from how we can do more to help our vulnerable customers to gaining more in-depth knowledge about the Openreach network from our in-house engineer.

Every afternoon we have a team meeting which is essential for a remote team. This a chance to vent any frustrations, chit-chat about how we’ve been feeling and play the occasional game (Scriblio is a team favourite).

What do you love about working for Cuckoo?

The people! Both my colleagues and customers are what makes my job so enjoyable. I am surrounded by such passionate and talented people which means that I am constantly learning new things. As we’re such a small team I spend time with colleagues across  different departments (brand, tech, corporate) that I would never have even spoken to in a bigger company.

And obviously the customers are a huge part of my job. I love engaging with a multitude of different personalities and love helping them to get the most out of our service.

Everyone at Cuckoo is focused solely on the customer and making broadband frictionless for our customers. It is refreshing to be surrounded by colleagues who genuinely care so much!

What have you learnt since joining Cuckoo?

So much! I’ll be the first to admit that I knew very little about broadband before joining Cuckoo in August. The onboarding process was amazing but involved a lot of information plugging which admittedly left me feeling a little overwhelmed. However I adapted very quickly and this was mainly due to the support from my incredible team. I learnt that there is definitely no such thing as a stupid question and there wasn’t one team member who wasn’t there if I needed to reach out for guidance.

Jodie shares what it's like to spend a day helping the flock...

A day at Cuckoo as a Broadband Eggspert

Our customers are why we’re here. What brings us together is how we can build a great experience that makes our customers’ lives better. We think we’ve been doing a pretty decent job too with our customers rating us #1 for service on MoneySavingExpert and an Excellent rating on Trustpilot.

Here’s how we tried to make things a little easier for our flock this year:

In February we launched our online home move journey. Plug in your new property details and away you go. One fewer thing to worry about for the 500 members of our flock heading to a new pad this year!

Your friends are over and you want to get them online. No more “where’s that little card that came with the router”? Hello *click* *click* DONE.

We heard a lot of people finding it a right old faff to cancel when they were moving back home or heading abroad. People are used to navigate a long maze to find a help link to find a phone number to call someone to just stop their service. Not here. It’s simple and easy online and when you’re ready to come back we’ll be waiting.

At Cuckoo, we’re very proud of our tech team. They’re the best in the biz and they help build the foundations of what Cuckoo is today and what it could be tomorrow.

They’re ten steps ahead so we can move faster, better than the rest.

Genuinely mindblowing speeds for the hungriest of data hogs and available on the most flexible plans out there. We think Full Fibre is the future and so we brought a bit of it back in our time machine.

Invoices, Payments, calculating charges. It ain’t glamorous but you sure notice when it’s out of whack. Our team have been beavering away to build best-in-class technology here so we’re set for our exciting plans in the coming months.

It’s not all monumental, cosmic leaps forward. Sometimes we do little things to brighten your day. Because that brightens ours. Knowing that we added even one smile in the last year. That’s a win.

We've heard some of you like to get your own snazzy gear and you don't need yet another router for Christmas this year. That's ok. We made it super easy to keep your existing router and help the environment with less waste and fewer deliveries. 

We ran a hackathon in June, looking for little ways to sprinkle joy over the journey to join Cuckoo. If you join Cuckoo we added a new celebration at the end of signup. We celebrate every new member of our flock and now you can see (and hear it!)

We’re not done yet. We have a TON more stuff to share with you next year. We’re cracking on with our mission to make the internet frictionless. Let’s just say 2022 is going to be a great year to be a member of the flock!

OK go on. One spoiler. Let’s just say that our Eggceptional Full Fibre isn’t the only speedy thing you’ll be seeing around these parts.

What do you want to see in 2022?
Let us know your ideas or wishes on Twitter here.

2021 is coming to a close. It’s been an odd year for sure. Over at Cuckoo HQ we’ve got a lot we’d like to celebrate with our flock. We’ve grown over 600% and welcomed 22 friendly new faces to our team (me included!).

The Cuckoo End of Year Wrap 2021

How do we organise ourselves? And how do we make decisions?

These are questions I've been struggling with for the past couple of months. Business is a lot about setting up rhythms of work that align people. Those rhythms define people's day to day interactions and act as the crucible of decision making. Startups clear advantage is speed of manoeuvre. So the way we organise ourselves and make decisions are key.

This blog post answers the first question: How do we organise ourselves? And here's the summary of our answer:

A bit of background on myself and Cuckoo. I was originally a civil servant in the Treasury. I'm now the CEO at Cuckoo where I see my four main roles as strategy, fundraising, culture and communicatons. We started work in February 2020 and switched our first customer (my parents) 5 months later. Since then we've raised $6m in venture capital, launched eggceptionally fast broadband speeds and been voted the top provider for customer service in the country.

People drive communications
Communications drive systems
Systems drive product
Therefore, your product is defined by your people

My co-founder Dan introduced me to Conway's Law. It broadly states that "any organisation that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation's communication structure".  I loved this when I first heard it but now realise there's something missing. People.

I'm rightly proud of the twenty eight people who are now the Cuckoo team, given we started this year with six. We care deeply about who join us. So we've defined what values we value when looking for new members of the flock. When you join Cuckoo, you take a psych profile (personality and character test) to both understand yourself and help others understand you.

Tabatha and Tommy together lead our marketing efforts. Here are their results:

Tabatha (Growth) - Adventurer - Adventurer personalities are true artists, but not necessarily in the typical sense where they’re out painting happy little trees. Often enough though, they are perfectly capable of this. Rather, it’s that they use aesthetics, design and even their choices and actions to push the limits of social convention. Adventurers enjoy upsetting traditional expectations with experiments in beauty and behavior – chances are, they’ve expressed more than once the phrase “Don’t box me in!”

Tommy (Brand/UX) - Protagonist - Protagonists feel called to serve a greater purpose in life. Thoughtful and idealistic, these personality types strive to have a positive impact on other people and the world around them. They rarely shy away from an opportunity to do the right thing, even when doing so is far from easy.

You should hopefully see how the values, character and temperament of the person in a given role, will directly impact the product they produce for our business. I'd take an Adventurer and a Protagonist leading our marketing any day of the week.

So we've got a bunch of great people. How do we organise ourselves into small, coherent teams?

Anecdote #1 - The HP Way
"I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company’s existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. As we investigate this, we inevitably come to the conclusion that a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively which they could not accomplish separately. They are able to do something worthwhile— they make a contribution to society (a phrase which sounds trite but is fundamental)."

The HP Way: Dave Packard on How to Operate a Company
– David Packard the founder of HP

Areas - Product, Marketing, Operations
Teams - Growth, Service, Brand/UX, Tech, Finance, Talent & People, Strategy
Leadership - CEO, Heads, Team Leads, Managers

When we started Cuckoo I subscribed to the notion that you set an ambitious market share goal in the future, and everyone in the business then works to that. I remember one of our early plans was to ask, how can we grow to 1 million customers? The plan was great. But was also missing something. Product-first thinking.

We've now launched 1Gb download speeds (FTTP), free setup (12 month contracts) and have an even juicier launch planned for early next year. All things we hadn't actually planned to do at the start of the year. These core product changes in turn impact how we should market. So that's why we now think of our business in three sequential areas: Product, Marketing and Operations.

Obviously these divisions are all false constructs and dividing lines we place on our collective human endeavour. But at the same time, they are useful in thinking through problems and ideas. Since telecoms is our TAM (total addressable market), our product derives our SAM (serviceable available market) and our marketing derives our SOM (serviceable obtainable market).

We also have teams. Think tribes of skill sets. The easy thing would be to think that only Growth and Brand/UX control Marketing for example. Or only Tech and Brand/UX impact Product. But in actual fact every part of the business impacts every other part. So our "Areas" and "Teams" are two sides of the same coin. The human service our Eggsperts provide to customers is as much "our product" as the Cuckoo website we click through.

And its leaders of teams, and within teams that embed this knowledge. So here's our rough hierarchy today:

Board - Challenges strategy alongside legal and financial decision making.

CEO - Leads strategy, fundraising, culture and communications.

Heads - Lead strategy formulation with a core focus on Product, Marketing and Operations.

Team leads - Lead specific tribes (Teams) of Cuckoo.

Managers - Lead the development of people.

A quick note on scaling and how these might change. Below is a slide from a recent team away day. It's a great analogy for how a startup scales, but equally, how teams within a startup scales. Just as our Service and Tech teams might be approaching the cusp of Family > Tribe, the wider business might be moving into Tribe > Village territory.

So in the same way the CEO (me!) sets the strategy, fundraising, culture and communications of the business as a whole, team leads will be doing the same for their teams as complexity increases.

Anecdote #2 - Startups can learn a lot from the military
“Given the same amount of intelligence, timidity will do a thousand times more damage in war than audacity.”
Carl von Clausewitz

Startups are often like a battlefield. Chaotic. Fast. Life or death. Ecstasy and rage. And while the perceived top-down world of the military might at first seem at odds with startup life, we can actually learn a lot. Why? The principle of mission command. Competence, trust, understanding, intent, orders, initiative, and risk acceptance. All evidenced in this great paper on the Yom Kippur War.



People, tick. Structure, tick. So what do we do now? We need direction and we do this in three general forms: setting, calibrating and educating.

Setting is about plotting the route to the harbour of the future. Calibrating is about taking readings along the journey and adjusting course if needed. Educating is about increasing our understanding of the world around us.

Vision (the unseen world ahead we see) - make the internet frictionless > Mission (how we'll speed up this future) - build the most powerful gateway to the internet > Ambition (what that tangibly means for us) - grow to a £1bn revenue business > Strategy (running the OODA loop) - refined by the Cuckoo team > OKRs (objectives and key results) - set quarterly to hold ourselves to account

Board meetings (every other month) > Heads meetings (every other week) > Sprint planning (every other week) > Team check ins (ad-hoc)

Growth slack updates (daily) > Service slack updates (weekly) > CEO Sunday email (weekly) > Customer feedback sessions (every other week) > Management accounts emails (monthly) > Shareholder email (quarterly)

Anecdote #3 - Coordination headwinds; how organizations are like slime moulds
A long and lovely emoji deck on how speed can atrophy as organisations get bigger. Here's the crib notes on how to guard against the creep of stasis:
- Small teams, small goals
- Leadership let go of the detail
- De-couple things, aim for converged "eventual" perfection.



Here's the simplified Cuckoo theory of organisation:

In a future blog we'll aim to also answer the next key question: How we make decisions? Some of the things we plan to cover are:

Do we wait for total agreement or do we "disagree and commit"?

Is it important to get decisions perfect or to get them made?

How do we reflect on decisions we've made previously? Are they open to challenge and re-making?

What do we do to ensure good decision quality?

And here's a little poem to reward you for getting to the end:

“We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further; it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea,
White on a throne or guarded in a cave
There lies a prophet who can understand
Why men were born: but surely we are brave,
Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand.”

This is a blog post about our business. If you’re a Cuckoo team member, just about to join us or generally interested in startups, this is the content for you.

Cuckoo voted top for customer service on Money Saving Expert

Thanks to our flock

Scores on the doors

More from Cuckoo

A day at Cuckoo as a Broadband Eggspert

The Cuckoo End of Year Wrap 2021

Cuckoo Culture Vol II - How we organise ourselves

How fast can you go?