Opinion
Key to Real Customer Satisfaction
 By Robert Faletra
It seems to me that Microsoft is taking the wrong approach to force its partners into taking customer satisfaction survey. In case VARs haven't heard, Microsoft will force all who want to achieve or maintain Gold level status, to participate in its customer satisfaction index study.
I'm not against VARs getting an understanding of customer satisfaction levels. In fact, I believe they should do more to understand customers and their perception. But the trouble with Microsoft's approach is that it's highly unlikaely to return much usable data. What Microsoft should be surveying for is the total customer experience through its partners when its products are included in a solution.
Let me use myself as a far-too-simple hypothetical example but one that will illustrate my point.
I personally own a Lenovo Reserve Edition laptop. It's a wonderful machine with wonderful support. Trouble is, the operating system is Microsoft Vista. If I were to be surveyed as to my satisfaction with the reseller I obtained the machine from, it would score highly. Ask me about the hardware and I also would be raving. If I were to be surveyed about the total customer experience with this product, however, it would result in much lower satisfaction numbers. Those numbers would be dragged down exclusively because of Vista. So my total customer experience here is abysmal because of a single element that makes up the total experience—that's important to note.
I'm not arguing that it isn't important to understand how solution providers perform in the market. In fact, if a VAR consistently falls short any vendor ought to think about the value in working with that partner. If all Microsoft is trying to accomplish is development of a system that will weed out partners, then perhaps it should proceed.
But if what it really wants to do is understand what is happening in the market when a Microsoft product is baked into a solution—and how it can be sure that all the gears that must mesh to result in a great customer experience are well-oiled—then I think it needs to look at this a bit differently.
So here are a few suggestions: First, Microsoft needs to state clearly what it wants to accomplish over the long term. If that is to determine which portions of its partner base are poor performers, what they can do to improve their customer satisfaction levels, then it should develop an ongoing system that regularly surveys customer satisfaction of these VARs.
But if what it really wants to do is determine the entire engagement and experience a customer feels then it needs to go after the total customer experience. That will also give it some benchmark data it can use for comparison as we move further along the path to cloud computing. |