But we just found out that it was two years in a row. We achieved it for 2026 with our 2026 surveys and I asked about the criteria – we seem to have the required response rate and ratings most years, and they said yeah you’re right. You have it for 2025 and 2026. I think we would have had it past years also but not sure when they started.
I am normally not a fan of all of those awards. I’ve had pay for play offers to get CIO Review Magazine best in service, CEO of the year, Azure Service Provider of the year, etc many years in a row. If I pay enough for the honor, I’ll get it and can even put a press release on the website. I’ve had the offers to be an “Author” on Forbes Publishing – they’ll assign me a ghost writer, and I can order as many copies as I want to give out – and it will only cost me 5-6 figures….
But we found out this year that last year and this year, Clearly Rated has listed us in the Best Of IT Services category because of our NPS.
But this is a fun one. We do pay Clearly Rated, but we pay them before we know the results and we pay them no matter what the results are, we’re paying for the survey process and having it handled by an independent third party with audits and checks. We’ve been paying them for many years now to survey our clients. I want honest, transparent, and actionable feedback from our clients. We ask them how we’re doing, the renewals and low churn speak for themselves, but I have a growth mindset and we can always be just a bit better than we were. So we have them do the surveys, we can’t tweak the results and doctor them up.
And apparently we’re better at taking care of client SQL Server environments than we are at keeping track of awards…
Why We Use ClearlyRated in the First Place
At first 7ish years ago, I had built a SurveyMonkey survey to send to users. How are we doing? Where can we improve? The goal was to get a number score (Clearly rated uses NPS – NPS alone is bad, I think – it gets sentiment but not the why, and not the trends and micro-trends to continually improve service), but to find out where we can improve. You can chalk that up to one part always wanting to be a bit better, and one part being the kind of person who always thinks I’m just one implosion away from a bad moment. I wanted to make sure we were always a good value and earning the renewals, not just presuming on them.
A friend told me about Clearly Rated that they used and they liked that it was arm’s length. The results are the results, but it is scientific, repeatable to survey and you can even see how your team does against each other (in the early days of Straight Path) or how your divisions are doing (today) so you can see if there is training to be done.
We also wanted to solicit feedback. Sure I want the kudos and testimonials – and check out our page from the link above. We get them! But we also ask a loaded question that says even if you are happy, tell us one area we can improve. We then follow-up on those areas that folks identify.
In fact, it was the annual survey a number of years ago where we saw that while we got high marks and clearly folks loved us – we noticed one category was stronger in the “usually” category than the “always” category compared to the rest… Proactive. We ask a series of We are …… A good value/proactive/responsive/etc. And Proactive was looking like a solid B – but the others were in the A to A plus camp. We launched our proactive dashboards, and ultimately decided to make the tool that is our monitoring tool, Skopos, that we are in the midst of rolling out. Because the surveys said we could be just a bit more proactive.
Feedback from clients who seem to mostly like us but are put on the spot to tell us where we can improve is priceless. And when there is a trend – that’s fodder for our annual goals and off-site meeting.
The goal with this process isn’t to someday achieve some “good enough” rating and stop. It’s to set a target and keep working towards it.
What The Numbers Show
Our team apparently earned the Clearly Rated Best of IT Services award in both 2025 and 2026. Our current public profile there shows we have 235 verified client ratings, 4.9 out of 5 stars and we have the 2025 and 2026 best in service award designations on our profile.
Our team is amazing. I’m sure there are many great teams out there – and we’re friends with quite a few of them – but this is a testament to the concern for client service and our values (Trust360, Ownership Mentality, Generosity and Humility) in each member of our team. Our NPS is unheard of in most service industries – 93.5% in 2026, 90% in 2025.
The numbers show that we listen, we care, we learn from them and we work hard at finding the themes and patterns to improve in. We will never have the attitude of “we’ve arrived.”
Winning Twice Means More Than Winning Once
Seeing that we have high scores each year makes me really proud of the team and all they do to work on service delivery and relationship building. The survey responses that speak of us as a partner or part of our clients’ teams speaks volumes about each person on our team and the way they care for our clients.
Seeing that we won two years in a row means we didn’t just have a good or lucky year – it means our team is consistently doing what they need to be. Even if I hammer on the “where can we improve?” responses – I do it because I care about us striving to always get better. And the team doesn’t just put up with it, they listen and work on it.
Winning a sale is great. Having a renewal after a first quarter is great since we don’t keep folks on a cell-phone contract like so many do. But year over year renewals for the long haul combined with surveys painting a similar picture over the years shows that our team is genuinely appreciated and that our focus on relationship, values, and culture first is working. I’m counting on that mattering well into the future, even as AI and automation seek to remove that connection and the values from the equation.
It Does Not Mean We Get Everything Right
I just posted yesterday about 9 ways that managed DBA services can go wrong. And there are way more than 9 ways. Our one detractor score we ever got was still directed squarely at me. I have communication issues. I sometimes err on the side of Ownership Mentality and have picked the wrong hill to die on. I’ve grown, but I still get it wrong. Our team has had to be coached, we’ve dropped balls. Some client relationships weren’t right. We learned about the 3 bad fits I blogged about a few weeks ago through the survey and self-reflection.
But. We’ve heard all of the feedback. I’m sure our clients can tell you while rolling their eyes about the meeting request that Evan, our COO, and I send to hear more about the constructive feedback. We take each piece of feedback and learn from it. We teach the team. We coach. We make sessions at the annual meeting – we optimize to learn.
The Feedback Matters More Than the Badge
Awards are useful external evidence, particularly in a market filled with self-reported claims and a gazillion accolades and headlines available to purchase. But a badge or a headline can’t tell you how to actually run your company better and where to make the tweaks.
It’s the client comments, the patterns, the trends, and the ratings that are tough to read that can promote the change. It’s the relentless follow-up on the feedback received that can give you the ideas to create a Proactive data warehouse and PowerBI reports for folks or finally make the gigantic investment in your own monitoring tool.
We get the hard truths and the incremental improvements from surveys that we’d never get from buying that accolade I can buy 4-6 times a year in my e-mail or signing that deal to become “an author” of my own Forbes book.
Things like:
- Better transitions when a lead DBA leaves and a new one joins (talked about that yesterday)
- Better documentation for the team on our playbook to be consistent in service (Evan is working on that right now)
- Better monthly communications at our monthly client check-ins.
- Clearer escalation paths.
- Paying a bit more attention to hours and engagement sizing from the start.
There is more. And there always will be something to improve. Likewise, with our team, we have our annual all-hands meeting in Boston this year in a few weeks. We ask our clients to be in emergency only mode for a few days with us while we retool, improve and come back stronger and better each year. But we ask the team to break into groups each year and write up issues for our issues list. And the leadership team works hard at engaging on improving those issues all year. We do a great job. But there will always be a thing to improve from a client. There will always be things about our model and how we do business that can be made better for our team. There are certainly moments where the human side of me and the self-doubt side of me would rather just pretend like things are fine and not do the surveys, not read the speaker feedback form after I deliver a session and not do the issues list. But we won’t grow if we don’t.
Don’t get me wrong. The badge is really cool. And to have it two years in a row? I’m excited.
Thank You
As always a big thanks to the clients who take the time to respond each year and not get annoyed at the repeated reminders that the surveys are out there. Thank you to the team who work hard daily to keep our level of service always getting just a bit better. We have one of the most amazing teams out there. Sure they are the folks who are MVPs, authors, bloggers, community tool makers, and folks who taught the MCMs – but they are also people who genuinely care about our clients. And not just because of a feedback score. It shows.
And thanks to the clients who share the tough feedback when we could have done a better job. It’s that feedback and your trust in us to share that with us that helps inspire us to get it right.
Closing: We’ll Try to Pay Better Attention Next Year
If we win this in 2027, we’ll do a better job of noticing it so I can congratulate our team and thank our clients. If we don’t? I’ll tell you we didn’t and tell you what we learned. But either way, we’ll be doing our survey with Clearly Rated next year and learning what the survey shows us next spring and summer.