April 12, 2019 | Larry Goldman | Senior Director, Product Marketing
It’s springtime in Denver, as evidenced by the flowering trees, swarms of cyclists, and the occasional bomb cyclone. Yet another telltale sign of the season is the arrival of Spinnaker Support’s annual customer satisfaction survey!
Why an Annual Customer Satisfaction Survey?
Even though we receive and measure feedback on individual support tickets, we believe that a ticket represents only a single frame in the whole customer relationship movie. Customer satisfaction should be measured as a collection of interactions. An annual survey is a more powerful indicator of overall success precisely because it captures the entire experience, from the account management to the daily support to the quarterly business reviews and so on.
The Result: Satisfaction Remains High
This year’s survey, which covered the 2018 fiscal year, saw a record number of responses from our global customer base. We appreciate the continued high marks and the thoughtful feedback.
Our overall customer satisfaction score from respondents was 98.6%, which we believe is the highest rated satisfaction level for any vendor that delivers Oracle and SAP software support. Customers rated us on service quality, responsiveness, issue follow-up and resolution, functional and technical knowledge, and our understanding of their businesses.
94.7% of responders were highly likely or likely to recommend our services. We value the time our customers take to speak with prospective customers and industry analysts. Their positive references have helped us secure many new customers over the years.
Other survey results are shown in the figure below:
Planning Trends for the Near Future
Each year, we use the survey to benchmark our customers’ short-term application plans. This allows us to remain aligned with important trends that influence business decisions and inform customers of market information they might want to know.
The figure below shows how plans overall remain relatively consistent, with most customers expecting no near-term changes. As you might expect, more customers are moving to a cloud solution with less upgrading or migrating to a new on-premise system.
Interpretation:
Overall, 44% of customers are staying with their current applications, because they are high-performing, stable, and reliable. Only a small percentage of these customers plan to extend the footprint of their current applications, and most users don’t see the value of adding new on-premise modules. It would appear that customers are adding cloud edge products or are standing pat awaiting cloud replacement solutions to mature.
Drilling down, we see that:
- 20% of customers are planning to upgrade their current application to a newer version, which they often do under Spinnaker Support using their archived releases.
- 23% are planning to move to a completely new on-premise application altogether, suggesting that a cloud replacement solution is years down the road.
- Only 12% are planning a near-term migration to cloud, as most feel that cloud ERP solutions are unready.
Our takeaway is that Spinnaker Support customers trust us to keep their legacy systems highly maintained, secure, and adaptable to changing business processes and surrounding technologies.
We Love the Kudos…
We are always touched by the positive customer comments we get from the annual surveys – many of which commend specific engineers and analysts. A selection from this year:
“Doesn’t matter the problem, all get involved until the job is done. All staff are friendly, knowledgeable, and most helpful.”
“Overall, working with Spinnaker Support is a very positive experience. I have come to trust them.”
“Very proactive approach to customer needs. Significant difference if compare with Oracle standard support stream. For a critical P1 ticket opened from one of our branches, the Spinnaker team stayed on the phone for several hours until the issue was identified and resolved.”
“Spinnaker Support is second to none. Every opportunity I have experienced, issues were resolved promptly, and follow-up was excellent. This team is great!”
But We Also Appreciate the Candid Feedback.
It’s not just about what we did right, but also about how we can improve the level of customer satisfaction in 2019. We ask: “What recommendations, if any, do you have that would help us improve our service,” and we share these answers internally with our entire team. The feedback is meaningful guidance for our business investments and operational processes. We listen and act.
Coming Up Next
In addition to our standard satisfaction questions, we added other topics to this year’s survey, with questions regarding security, audits, and education. The answers were confirming and informative, and we’ll explore those responses in the next few weeks.
