Never let it be said that at BMS we don’t do our bit to promote the cause for the SBSC partner program! As we were having a new van it seemed a shame not to adorn it with something to brighten it up a bit. Maybe we should hold a competition and people can send in photos of where they’ve seen the SBSC partner logo!
On Friday I went to the CRM roadshow at TVP in Reading. Although the presentation was mainly technical what interested me most was the development going on around the next release and in particular how it will integrate with MOSS. Sharepoint Designer should make designing and adapting Sharepoint much easier than before and includes many new plugin web parts which should benefit CRM users.
I was very pleased to see the improvements and new features available and it looks like Microsoft is going to have a very strong influence in the CRM marketplace in the next 12 months, although they obviously know they have a lot of work to do yet. The tight integration of different technologies and products highlighted Microsoft’s commitment to enable partners to leverage higher revenues through customisation and development. There is a sense of real maturity about the upcoming releases and it will be interesting to watch how customers and partners react.
In the mailbag this morning I received a poster from Microsoft as part of the re-enrollment for SBSC 2007. It’s basically a maps.live.com image of our office with a large arrow pointing to it with the text “BMS Recommended by Microsoft”. What a great idea! Everyone around the office who’s seen it has gone “wow, look at that”. At the bottom of the poster is the SBSC logo and some information about the program aimed at customers. This is good stuff and the sort of thing we need more of from Microsoft to push the SBSC program forward.
We’re definitely going to frame it and hang it in our showroom, although the sales guys want to take it to the BNI breakfast meetings first and turn it into their 10 minute presentation! I wonder if I can order some more?
A while ago now I attended a marketing seminar with Robert Craven. One of the calls to action was filling in a postcard with 3 things we were going to do to help improve our business. The postcard was then posted to us several weeks afterwards by which time the idea was we would have completed or at least started those tasks.
One of my chosen things to do was conduct a customer survey to see what our clients really think about our services and solutions so I was very interested to read about the Microsoft Customer Satisfaction Index. Basically this takes the form of an email survey which is conducted on behalf of Microsoft by TNS Prognostics. You gain permission from your customers, upload a spreadsheet wih all their contact info. on and hey-presto, TNS do the rest.
Your customers can choose to remain anonymous if they wish to do so. Some of the feedback we’ve had has raised a few eyebrows around here I can tell you! The great thing is that TNS not only collate all the data but also analysis it for you using industry proven methodology. On top of that as soon as a minimum of 10 customers have responded you start to earn partner points.
You can survey the same customers as often as once a quarter, which I think is probably too often. I think maybe once every 6 months is more realistic. One caveat though, we had several customers call us to ensure the survey was legitimate as it comes from an email address they won’t recognise so probably best to remind them to expect it.