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Your voice-driven innovations: What experience enhancements can you expect going forward with Companial?

Wednesday, June 15, 2022
Reading time: 7 minutes

With this post we open up the key findings from the feedback our partners shared with us in the annual partner satisfaction survey recently, also sharing our plans for how to further enhance our collaboration. We believe that being fully transparent with you – our partners – builds trust and motivates you to eagerly be a part of co-creating better experiences, firstly by sharing your expectations and feedback.

You could go straight to the resolutions part, or you could let us briefly walk you through the key findings from the feedback you provided, which explain the “why” behind our decisions and the direction we are heading.

Key highlights of the Companial partner satisfaction survey

Participation: 230 of our existing partners from 26 countries shared their views with us. We’ve read every line of your feedback, pulled the key insights which were discussed across different levels of the organization, and now we are ready to act on them.

Satisfaction with the overall experience with Companial:  On the given scale of 1 to 5 (with 5 being the best possible experience), 78% of respondents rated their experience at 4 or 5, giving us an overall rating of 4.03 out of 5, which is a solid evaluation, but still giving us room to better meet and exceed our partners’ expectations.

Satisfaction by major touchpoints (membership service): To better understand how smooth our partners’ experience is in the major touchpoints of the licensing membership service, we asked partners to evaluate the responsiveness, problem-solving skills and ability to provide guidance of their partner success manager, the information service, and their experience with handling operational queries.

Satisfaction ratings in all of the touchpoints covered reached the score of 4 and above and fluctuated between 4.0 and 4.3 (on the same scale of 1 to 5).

Likelihood of recommending Companial services to others (Net Promoter Score): To gain a greater sense of partner loyalty, we asked partners how likely they are to recommend Companial services to others. This led us to better understand how successful we are in earning partners’ hearts and turning them into true ambassadors of our services (and this army is truly large – over 45% of all responding partners fall into the promoters group), how many of them are satisfied, thus neutrals, and how many of the partners might not have had all expectations fully met yet and need more of our attention.

Following the classical NPS calculation model (applied scale from 0 to 10), the NPS reached 31, which falls in the ‘good’ NPS range according to the NPS model.

Potential areas to drive even more value for our partners: When asked about what we should consider doing differently to better meet your expectations, partners raised the following major topics. In a nutshell, our partners would appreciate:

  • More convenience and better usability in the support desk functionality
  • Even more responsiveness in solving their requests
  • To better support partners in understanding and adopting changes in the market, the members information service could be elevated even further. More advice, more explanations and more real stories about how other partners adapt to the change would be much appreciated
  • More automation, more detailed view in the billing and invoicing step
  • More localized and translated marketing materials in certain regions.

The strengths of the partner experience with Companial: We were positively overwhelmed by the number of warm comments our partners shared with us when asked what they appreciate most in the way we serve them. This gives us strong inspiration and motivation to further strive to deliver the great value and outstanding experience to our partners.

If you would recommend us, what reason would you give? What do you appreciate most in your collaboration with us?

  • Expertise and competence
  • People. Personal connection/direct contact. Close relationship
  • Partner support
  • Responsiveness. Speed
  • Professionalism. Reliability. Quality
  • Bridge to Microsoft
  • Communication. Information service
  • Guidance. Partner account management

Partners also assessed how much they feel Companial company values are exposed in the way we serve them. In partners’ perceptions, Companial is strongly seen as a CARING and OWNING organization, also significantly, yet slightly less, as CREATING and bringing JOY to partners.

Partner challenges and opportunities

When asked about the biggest challenges and opportunities our partners see in the market looking forward, there were four clear, predominant topics identified in the partner feedback:

  1. Migration to the cloud (driving cloud-first organizational change and transferring the SaaS model to the customer; ensuring stable cashflow from subscription-based business; migrating on-prem and more complex multi-country clients to the cloud)
  2. Human resourcing challenges that limit capacity and growth (strongly understaffed; hard to find skilled people)
  3. Understanding Microsoft strategy and adapting to changes and the new Microsoft Partner Program
  4. Demand generation in the cloud setup (getting more customers excited about the cloud; how to drive sales and marketing and generate leads and scale for the cloud) 

Our resolutions and next steps

After analyzing our partners’ feedback, we’ve generated valuable insights that have given us a clear direction on where we can improve the overall experience for our partners. Below is a list that details our priority areas and initiatives that have been started:

  • ONE new home for Companial web portals: We are making a major shift in bringing our portals into ONE online home for all Companial services, so our partners can benefit from the unified experience and one entry page which branches off to all the services they might need. Our partners will start experiencing the first tangible results in this area in the autumn. It’s an extensive project in which we are determined to constantly bring enhancements to make the partner digital experience with Companial more valuable, smooth and enjoyable.
  • Enhanced self-service support capabilities for our membership partners: We are rebuilding our online knowledge base to provide our partners with more easily consumable and convenient materials that they can use on the partner platform. We believe it will help our partners to find the answers to their ‘how-to’ type of questions more quickly. But don’t worry, we will definitely be keeping our traditional support channel open for all type of partner requests. In parallel, we are also redesigning the Service Desk user experience for creating and managing service tickets.
  • CSP invoicing and billing automation: To support our partners on the path of efficiently establishing operations in the cloud-first business, we are extending the capabilities for CSP invoicing and billing automation which will make the billing process for our partners more digitalized, simple and smooth. Currently, we are rolling out the beta testing and feedback process of the toolkit which bundles a sample code along with our guidance, so partners can import data from our systems and perform end-customer billing in a digital and more efficient way.
  • Most informed (= advised) partner community: We seek to make Companial members the best-informed partners in the Microsoft partner ecosystem. As we see from the feedback, our partners not only want to be informed, but also to be more advised and more easily understand how much the coming changes will impact their business. With this purpose in mind, we will continue further nailing our communications by providing better context and sharing best practices. To make sure that only relevant information reaches you, we’ve introduced a subscription center where you are welcome to profile your interests by choosing which topics are in fact relevant for you.
  • Increased membership value: We are re-evaluating our membership levels to make sure that we offer the right benefits and value at every level of membership.

Thank you once again for providing your honest feedback, it really does make a difference!

Sandra Matuleviciute-Bagdonaviciene
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