This VPN is listening to its users

"YOU'VE GOT TO START with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology" - Steve Jobs.

Customer experience is truly the most critical component that can make or break the success of a company. In fact, there have been many stories of companies going out of business only because they failed to pay attention to what their users had to say.

Believing that customers should be listened to and offered what they expect, one SaaS company went above and beyond. The results are simply awe-inspiring.

43 Days. Thousands of responses. Huge potential for improvements

PureVPN is considered the leading VPN service provider in town, boasting over 2,000 VPN servers and millions of users. The service is known for its dynamic set of features that are geared towards internet security, privacy and freedom.

At the end of 2017, the CEO of the VPN service invited his to answer a simple question: "What should we do to make PureVPN even better?"

Surprisingly, they received an overwhelming number of responses which took the CEO 43 days to go through.

After processing the responses, PureVPN dedicated all its resources to fixing problems and catering to user suggestions. After working on and fixing all the pain points of the users, here's a glimpse of what the VPN provider achieved in 2018:

1. The VPN provider became the very first VPN service in the industry to present a Privacy Policy which was in compliance with the European data protection act, GDPR. By complying with the GDPR policies, the VPN provider proved that it doesn't hesitate in rethinking its privacy and data-handling practices and doesn't shy away from giving users the ultimate control over their data.

2. PureVPN partnered with BugCrowd, a crowdsourced cybersecurity service, and started a Bug Bounty program. The program was an open invitation to the community of over 90,000+ ethical hackers to strip down the app to its bare bones and report major vulnerabilities. Amazingly, the bounty program ended up with only a handful of minor/not-so-harmful bugs.

3. Initially, the VPN provider made claims of enhanced speed and performance. However, the lack of any endorsement gave some sceptics something to gossip about. To counter the problem, PureVPN partnered with a renowned auditing firm, AV-Test GmbH. The experts at AV-Test endorsed not only all the speed and performance claims of the VPN provider but also highlighted some amazing findings, favourable to every PureVPN user such as seamless 4K streaming and more.

4. The VPN provider also redid its refund policy by extending it to 31 days.

5. The service also made significant improvements to its overall network infrastructure. Users now have the option of choosing whether they want a NAT'd and Non-NAT'd network. This powerful functionality adds another layer of anonymity and accessibility to the users by allowing them to use a Single IP. Moreover, the server pool has also been increased from mere 700+ to 2,000+ servers that has a collective IP pool of 300,000+ IPs. The Instant Kill Switch functionality has been given a complete overhaul for improved efficiency.

6. New features have been introduced to the service as well such as Port Forwarding, 1-Click connect, IKEv2 protocol support on Android, OpenVPN support on Mac and a cleaner User Interface.

7. Since a major chunk of the VPN users are streamers looking to unblock geo-restricted content, the VPN provider received considerable requests for more channels support. The VPN provider complied with the requests and added a good number of popular channels. PureVPN also extended its Popular Channels feature from browser extension to its applications as well for added convenience.

Final thoughts

"Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient" - Jeff Bezos. 

At the end of the day, PureVPN went beyond the norms for their customers and delivered a product they have always expected. The VPN provider has reiterated its commitment to its users and has vowed to continue listening to its users in 2019 and beyond. µ