Enter the email address that you used to sign up with Cuckoo.

You will be sent an email containing a link for you to log in with.

Simply follow the link and you’re into your account.

We get it. You use the same password for everything so it’s easy to remember. After all, no one wants to be remembering their first cat's birthday when they just want to see their latest broadband bill. But this is the problem.

As your online presence grows so too does the exposure of that same password you use. It only takes one company that has your details to have a data breach, and then the keys for your digital life are out there for everyone to use.

In fact before reading the rest of this update, see if your email and/or password has been involved in a data breach by searching https://haveibeenpwned.com/. You may be surprised.

Research has shown that 73% of users on the web have duplicate passwords for their accounts.

That’s why we’ve switched to magic links. They'll ensure that someone with your regularly-used password is not able to get into your Cuckoo account. Furthermore, your magic link can only be used once. Once you’ve used it, no one else can!

Go to cuckoo.co/login today to try out this feature.

We've removed passwords from My Account

Here at Cuckoo, keeping your account for your eyes only is of the utmost importance. Everyone that signs up is trusting us to keep their details safe. That’s why we’re changing how you sign in to your Cuckoo account. From today, this will be via a passwordless login, also known as a magic link.

The navigation on our site has had a visual refresh and been optimised for speed.

The sign up button that appears on mobile now responds to the speed the user scrolls at, to make interaction more intuitive.

Customers will now receive an invoice for their setup charge which can be dowloaded from My Account.

The tech team spent 2 weeks focussing on improving performance of the site, and they delivered! The user experience is a lot faster now.

If you’re trying to move home with us you can no longer select your current address to “move to”. (yes some people tried this 👀)

We’ve removed date of birth entry from the sign-up flow. By signing up to Cuckoo you now agree that you are 18 years old or over.

For further tech updates keep an eye on the Cuckoo content hub, where each month we’ll be showing what we’ve been up to behind the scenes.

Welcome to the inaugural tech update for Cuckoo. These updates will cover all things product development for you to marvel over, or in some cases think “I’m so glad they solved that”.

Tech Update - March 2021

We hope you’ve been enjoying your extra hour of daylight ☀️

Given the Zoom pub quizzes have started to dry up, here’s a quick one: do you know which are the only three European countries that don’t have daylight savings time? *

This month, the focus is on our wonderful Cuckoo Compass partner, Jangala. And if you’ve ever wondered how canal boats get broadband, we have something for you as well.

Celebrating the Cuckoo Compass & Jangala 🎉

As you know, 1% of your bill every month is used to help get the internet to places it’s needed most. And it’s Jangala we work with to make this happen.

Here are some examples of the types of Jangala projects you’ve helped support over the past few months via the Cuckoo Compass:

Helping vulnerable Londoners get access to mental health services - five Get Boxes have been deployed around London to enable people to access essential services

Providing Nepalese children access to books - a Big Box supplied to Books4Nepal provides connectivity for a library doing inter-school book loan

Getting internet to international refugee camps - from Calais to Kenya, access to the internet ensures provision of critical services, as well as enabling refugees to complete online courses

Enabling London schoolchildren to continue their studies in lockdown - Get Boxes have been sent out to an East London school to help children who were struggling to access educational materials at home

Connecting women in emergency housing in Essex - four Get Boxes have been deployed to provide internet to ten families in temporary accommodation in Thurrock

Cuckoo + a canal = broadband on a boat️

Thanks to an Openreach canal-trained engineer, we now provide internet to a customer on Regent’s Canal.

We knew about the flat-roof-trained and underground-trained engineers, but a diver being sent out to fix slow speeds was a new one for us!

We are the sad bearers of some bad news about BTO’s Valentine. It’s suspected that he perished somewhere between Angola and Democratic Republic of Congo.

Don’t be deterred though! If you’re still after your cuckoo migration fix, we recommend keeping an eye on PJ who’s expected to begin his journey north across the Sahara later this month.

This month, the focus is on our wonderful Cuckoo Compass partner, Jangala. And if you’ve ever wondered how canal boats get broadband, we have something for you as well.

Monthly newsletter - April 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

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Tech Update - March 2021

Monthly newsletter - April 2021

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