From the Sage MAS Team

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Everyone knows how important customer loyalty is to building a sustainable business – I don’t want to beat a dead horse.  As product managers, we are constantly faced with making product roadmap decisions, which often means walking a fine line between keeping our products current and competitive in the marketplace, with responding to “pain points” that our existing customers face.  Obviously building customer loyalty requires customers to have a great experience, and SO much of that experience rides on how they interact and work with our ERP products in their daily lives.  This is what we obsess with every single day – how can we solve customer pain points and add value that will lead to a better experience, and improve customer loyalty.

That being said, there’s another HUGE factor that we need to consider when it comes to driving customer loyalty – the relationship our customers have with their local Business Partners.  Call them resellers, solutions providers, VARs, whatever, but one thing is for certain – Business Partners represent the face of Sage day in and day out, and hence they play a critical role in contributing to the overall customer experience.  When we ask our customers how we’re doing (through the Net Promoter or NPS metric), it becomes very evident when reading their comments that the line is blurred between Sage and the Business Partner.  We specifically ask customers to rate their experience with our products AND their Business Partner.  You probably won’t be surprised that the #1 driver for overall customer loyalty is their satisfaction with their partner.  Of course this makes sense –  the Business Partner is the one who:

• Helps them choose the right solution in the first place
• Makes sure it gets implemented properly
• Introduces other integrated products to make a complete solution (products like CRM, BI as well as 3^rd party solutions)
• Provides training
• Provides the first-line of support

In order to improve the customer experience and drive Net Promoter scores up, we need to make it personal.  Our customers need to know that they DO have a voice, and we DO care what they think.  This is why we put programs in place to reach out to those customers who have a less than stellar experience.  However, the reality is, as the software vendor, we can only do so much – we need to rely on our Business Partners to help improve the experience, by having them reach out when things go wrong.

An exciting new development that we are launching for our Business Partners is an online tool (we call it the NPS Partner Portal) that will give them full visibility into how their customers are scoring them and our product based on the results of the surveys we regularly conduct.  (Of course, we realize that our customers may prefer to keep their responses anonymous, so that’s always an option.)  By sharing these results with our Business Partners, they are empowered to take any necessary action based on the feedback, which ultimately will lead to an improved experience.

This is just one more way that we are getting serious about providing an extraordinary customer experience.   So the next time Sage or your Business Partner reaches out to follow-up on a survey you recently completed, don’t be afraid to speak your mind – we (Sage and your Business Partner) will only get better if you continue to give us your candid feedback!

Scott Zandbergen

VP Product Management, Mid Market ERP