2018 Customer Satisfaction Survey Report

In this month’s newsletter, we are pleased to share the results of our 2018 customer satisfaction survey, which focuses customers under support. The purpose of the survey is to constantly improve our customer service and to identify their long-term needs.

The survey is part of Siveco China’s ISO 9001:2015-certified quality management system and was reviewed by Bureau Veritas during the last audit.

Over 90% of customers took the time to respond to the survey and 46% of the responses came from managers, demonstrating a very high level of engagement. Literature on the subject of online surveys suggests 90% is a very high response rate (10-30% being typical).

A pioneer of Smart Operation & Maintenance, Siveco provides solutions based on Coswin, bluebee® and bluebee® cloud. The following chart shows the share of different solutions under support, by number of users:

Siveco solutions benefit from a long history, over 30 years from Coswin, over 10 years for bluebee®. As technologies keep changing, Siveco proposes a proven upgrade path to customers. During 2018, Coswin 8i has clearly overtaken the older generation Coswin 7i: 60% of our Coswin clients use the latest version.

In the past few years, customers used to the 7i version have been reluctant to upgrade. During 2018, Microsoft ending support for older Windows operating systems, greater awareness of IT security issues and 4.0/Smart trends (including mobility) have become strong motivators for a change of version. Several upgrade projects have been signed during Q4 2018 and more are expected in 2019.

Since 2010, Siveco offers two levels of support plans, “Standard Support” and “Enhanced Support”, which comprises a yearly improvement plan, onsite assessments and monthly remote coaching based. For 2018, clients generally give positive feedback on Siveco China support, including 100% satisfaction in terms of ease of communication, response time and technical qualification.

The percentage of positive responses (total “Strongly agree” and “Agree”) is comparable to last year (“Respond on time” showing improvement).

This is confirmed by the following question: the graph shows the parts of support services that customers “strongly agree” are the most valuable.

Responses show that services which are usually not part of traditional software support are highly valued by customers (software vendors usually provide hotline support, bug fixes and rights to upgrade, charged between 18-22% of license fee annually).

The Coswin CMMS, now in its Coswin 8i version, has a long history dating back to the 1980s. Since 2008, Siveco pioneered the development of standard mobile solutions for Operation & Maintenance, the bluebee® suite, which explains the large proportion of Siveco client using mobile solutions.

Product satisfaction was high in 2018, in particular feedback on user experience is overall very positive (similar as last year but with slight improvement for feedback on the user interface). 94% of respondents say the system helps their work and are willing to recommend Siveco solutions to others.

When asked for feedback on more specific aspects of our solutions, respondents’ opinion is also very positive (stable compared to 2017) with interesting findings:

A breakdown of responses by solution (Coswin 7i, Coswin 8i without bluebee®, Coswin 8i with bluebee®, bluebee® cloud and bluebee®) shows that the smarter the solution, the higher the satisfaction.

Several survey questions explored the benefits obtained by clients.

All (100%) customers report that they have obtained benefits from working with Siveco. Responses show that customers benefit operationally from our solutions both in their day-to-day activities (which probably contributes to high end-user satisfaction as seen in the previous section) and in terms of corporate value. This is consistent with trends observed in our “2017 Maintenance in China survey”, with maintenance seen as “industrial risk prevention” well-aligned with the nation’s sustainable development objectives.

More specifically for bluebee®, practical benefits have been observed by clients, in line with our motto “for the worker of tomorrow”:

The survey also looked into customers’ new needs in terms of solutions: mobility for operations came in first (58%) followed by document management (50%).

Note that the survey was sent to existing customers: this section is not a general market study. We believe however that the findings are rather consistent with what Siveco sees in the market. In our “2017 Maintenance in China survey” with Shanghai University, 73% of respondents declared they planned to improve maintenance by using mobile solutions.

Since 2007, based on previous surveys’ results, Siveco has put a lot of emphasis on training, including quarterly Open Class training for customers under Enhanced contracts. This year’s responses show that interest in training has again increased: 75% of clients are interested in bluehoney online maintenance management training and 54% are willing to pay for additional training in general (up from 47% last year).

Customers are more and more willing to have their system hosted in the cloud, a services Siveco started to provide in 2008 with Alibaba Cloud (last year a global partnership was also signed to use Alibaba technologies as part of bluebee® cloud).

In our experience, factors in favor of cloud hosting include escalating IT costs, a growing awareness of security risks, past experience with server crashes and backup recovery problems.

As a result of this survey, improvement actions for 2019 have been defined based on our findings and will be managed by our Customer Service team as part of the company’s quality management process.

A more detailed report was also sent to all customers, along with a list of improvement actions taken in 2018 (based on last year’s survey) and actions planned for 2019.

Tags： Customer Satisfaction Survey