You may have heard the acronym CCD thrown around and thought to yourself, just another acronym. CCD stands for Customer-Connected Design. I’m Debi Richkas, Director of Customer-Connected Design for the MAS and Accpac products. The CCD teams within Sage have been around for a few years, but our approach has been around much longer.

In CCD, we see ourselves as the voice of our customers. Unlike surveys which are sent to thousands of customers with very little or no direct customer contact, the CCD team conducts usability studies with our actual customers to get feedback on our designs. We conduct our studies either face-to-face (e.g.. customer locations, Summit, or Insights) or on a video conference call. We use recording software that tracks the mouse and cursor actions of our customers during the studies. We then analyze the recordings and present the facts, not our personal preference, to groups within the R&D and Product Management teams. This allows our organization to make an educated decision about the direction of our products.

Some of you may have experienced the benefit of our studies first hand if you work with the MAS 90 or 200 products. The design to keep the report window open after printing was a result of usability studies with actual customers. This was not our initial plan, but after the overwhelming feedback this was a must.

Next week at Insights we will be conducting usability studies on the installation process for MAS 200 SQL and Accpac. We will also be conducting research on what our customers want from a Financial Reporter. If you would like to participate in a study, feel free to contact me as we are constantly soliciting for participants. Keep an eye out for an e-mail from my team; we may be coming to a city near you.

Key to staying agile, see Scot Larsen’s post, is collaboration. This applies to the various teams within Sage, and between Sage and our business partners, and the customers. If you haven’t read it yet, see the ekaas post on how Sage is collaborating with customers through the use of Ideas Management powered by VersionOne ™

And collaboration isn’t just working with our customers to deliver products they want to use, it is collaboration between the various product teams.  I work with the ProvideX technology team, which is the platform the MAS 90 200 is built on. This work gives the team broad exposure to technologies. We are using our skills to assist the other teams.

There are challenges to coordinating individuals across multiple campuses, and time zones, each with their own unique ‘culture’.  The way to address these challenges is through communication. To start we use common tools, and common language. SCRUM is a tool we use to aid in our collaborative efforts. It provides a common process with its own grammar that is consistent across campuses.

The second way to increase collaboration is to have meetings to discuss barriers to productivity. These meetings are not status meetings but rather opportunities to solve problems that limit productivity. This requires communication skills, and trust of those involved. Everything needs to be open to discussion, and a willingness to examine assumptions. This can be tough as this is a soft skill that not everyone practices on a regular basis.

So collaboration is fundamentally rooted in open communication. Communication is a skill that must be learned, and practiced in an environment of trust. This can take time to develop and once a company becomes comfortable with the practice, collaboration becomes easier as does agility.

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

With MAS 90 release 4.4 (currently in development) we plan to deliver Inventory, Purchase Order, and Bill of Material modules on business framework. This will be a major milestone where significant functionality will be available on business framework. It has been a valuable R&D investment and we believe it will yield significant benefit to us and our community.

“Business framework” combined with the bundled “Customizer” functionality give MAS 90 a formidable position in the market place. It makes MAS 90 probably the most easy to integrate, flexible and extendable business application foundation in the market place. It allows code-less customization and provide safe upgrade path otherwise not possible in competitive products.

It echoes commitment to serve our customers better whose solution includes MAS 90 base functionality and has a need to integrate/customize as part of their implementation.

Given much of the community do few things regularly – like “Extend or Enhance” base functionality; “Integrate” with some other functionality; “Customize” base functionality; etc. I will be curious to know how various implementation partners, master developers, third party software developers are utilizing business framework.

What are your “aha” moments during this journey of MAS 90 adopting business framework? What success stories and best practices you enjoy the most that you would like to share with broader audience and your MAS product teams?

Specially, I am interested in how business framework is enabling you to win business and do your job better…faster resulting in net gain for our customers. What percentage of your customization is leveraging Customizer? Do you know you can do Web based mash-ups using Customizer?

PS: I already see quite busy discussion forums around MAS 90 customization/business object capability. Let’s not duplicate similar technical discussion that get discussed there. Here, I am looking for how business framework is enabling business wins and opportunities.

PPS: If you don’t already know about Customizer – I will encourage you to review the information material on it. You may find it to be a great knowledge to have as you walk in at customer site.