It’s all about the customer: we have plenty of room to improve

This week I am blogging from the lovely pacific northwest, from our meeting off-campus with our teams from around the world focused on customer and partner satisfaction. I partner with Toby Richards from our Sales & Marketing Services Group on how we listen and respond to out customers and focus on improving our satisfaction across the board. Internally, we call this the Customer and Partner Experience (CPE) effort, and I focus on supporting the efforts in our three product divisions, across all of our product lines.

On the topic, Eric Lai from Computerworld has an article this week that takes a look at our effort to dedicated to improving customer satisfaction.

“According to its surveys, that strategy has borne fruit, says the company.

“We have plenty of room to improve, but overall satisfaction is at their highest levels ever,” said Toby Richards, general manager for worldwide customer experience at Microsoft in an interview Monday.

“For instance, Richards says that Microsoft’s decision to repeatedly delay the release of Windows Vista in order to tighten up its security and features was heavily influenced by survey results that showed customers asking for greater “product stability and reliability,” Richards said.”

As noted, we created the CPE effort to be a nimble, cross-group team, lead by exec partners Kathleen Hogan (worldwide customer support and services), and my boss, Jon DeVaan, who leads the Core Operating System Division in Windows. We work to continuously improve and drive improving the experience for our customers and partners every day, and on the things we do that impact our customes and partners.

But it’s a continuous journey, as I’ve heard our senior execs say.

We are dedicated to improving our “listen and respond” systems, our product quality and overall security & privacy (which are closely intertwined), as well as how we handle and reacts to issues such as the changes to daylight saving time.

Tags: Microsoft, loyalty, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service.

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