Customer service often comes last in Telecom. At Stratus, it comes first—by design.
We’ve spent more than two decades building fiber networks powering businesses across industries, and our clients love the performance. But the real Stratus difference isn’t just in our technology. It’s in how we treat the people who rely on it.
For us, customer experience isn’t a department—it’s a mindset woven into every part of our organization. From our engineers to our sales team to our executive leadership, everyone plays a role in ensuring that our customers’ experience with Stratus is responsive, transparent, and human. That mindset recently earned us the 2025 Stevie® Award for Customer Service Department of the Year – Telecommunications (one of the most prestigious business awards in the world), but awards were never the goal. This recognition simply reflects what our customers have known all along: Stratus is a partner that shows up, solves problems, and listens—for single-site startups and multi-site enterprises alike.
In this post, we’ll share how we approach service at Stratus—and why our customer-first philosophy is more than a tagline. It’s the foundation of everything we do.
Built Around the Customer—From the Inside Out
Exceptional customer service isn’t confined to a department—it’s embedded in our culture.
Every team across our organization, from our frontline technicians to executive leadership, shares a unified goal: create a seamless, responsive, and reliable experience for every customer. That means more than solving issues. It means anticipating them, communicating clearly, and being available when it matters most.
We didn’t build a traditional support team. We built a proactive, high-touch experience layer that stays with customers for the life of their service.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- Presales experience optimized via an exhaustive, customer-service-centric onboarding program designed by an organizational psychologist. Sales only wins if the customer wins.
- Post-sale expectations calls so there are no surprises during installs.
- Quarterly wellness checks to spot and solve issues before they impact operations.
● NOC (Network Operations Center) is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week by in-region network engineers, our NOC offers highly technical expertise to resolve issues immediately without escalations. In Q4 2024 alone, the team fielded 936 total calls with an average wait time of just 18 seconds, demonstrating industry-leading responsiveness.
- First invoice reviews to simplify billing and build confidence early.
- Executive Leadership Mentoring is designed to ensure that the service-oriented DNA of Stratus is fostered in every employee.
- Customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score (NPS) tracking to measure how we’re doing—and where we can get better. And today our customer satisfaction and NPS are almost double the industry standard.
Scaling Thoughtful Service
As Stratus has grown, our service approach has scaled with it. In 2023, we formalized our Customer Experience Team—a group with more than 30 years of telecom expertise focused exclusively on customer health and success.
This team was designed to fill a critical industry gap: real human support that doesn’t just open tickets but resolves issues, follows through, and adds value.
They’ve also helped drive innovation internally:
· We transitioned to an industry-leading support platform, to improve visibility, automation, and responsiveness.
· We launched a self-service portal with real-time usage insights, billing history, and error logs.
· We built out customer success playbooks to stay engaged with customers, provide help before challenges escalate, and offer solutions as their businesses grow and evolve..
Metrics That Matter—Because People Matter
Behind all of these initiatives is a simple goal: earn long-term trust.
That’s why we don’t just track service volume—we measure impact. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) is nearly double the telecom industry average. Our customer satisfaction rate is well above the industry norm, and our churn rate is less than half of typical telecom benchmarks.
But the real proof comes in the day-to-day relationships: customers who reach out to a familiar name, not a faceless queue. Teams that know your account, your goals, and your growth plans. Service that’s designed to feel more like a partner—and never like a help desk.
Looking Ahead: A Culture of Service That Grows With You
This Stevie® Award is a proud moment for Stratus, but more than anything, it’s validation of the philosophy we’ve believed in from day one: when you build a business around customer care, everything else gets stronger.
Service isn’t just a metric for us—it’s the lens through which we make decisions, design processes, and measure success. It’s why our engineers sit in on onboarding calls. It’s why we review bills before our customers even ask. It’s why we’re always listening for ways to improve, whether or not there’s a problem to fix.
As we grow, our promise is to scale thoughtfully—maintaining the direct relationships, proactive mindset, and human-first support that define what it’s like to work with Stratus. Whether you’re a new customer coming online or a long-time partner with evolving needs, our job stays the same: to make your experience seamless, reliable, and personal.
Because at the end of the day, it’s not about winning awards. It’s about earning trust—and keeping it.