2020 Customer Satisfaction Survey Report
In this month’s newsletter, we are pleased to share the results of our 2020 customer satisfaction survey, which focuses on Support and Product for customers under support. The purpose of the survey is to strengthen our relationship with customers, identify their long-term needs and constantly improve our products and customer services.
Since 2013, the yearly customer satisfaction survey has been part of Siveco’s ISO 9001:2015-certified Quality Management System, audited by Bureau Veritas.
Respondent profile
88% of our customers took the time to respond to the survey, demonstrating a very high level of engagement. The response rate is similar to last year. The high management-level response rate (43% of responses came from managers and above) reflects the strategic importance of maintenance or asset management for companies.
A pioneer in Smart O&M, Siveco provides solutions based on Coswin (back-office solution with in-depth maintenance management functionalities), bluebee® cloud (back-office solution with a wider risk prevention scope and integration features) and bluebee® (mobile solution including Android apps and WeChat). The different products are either used alone or in combination, integrated, depending on client’s needs.
This year, we have tried to assess the prevalence of “Smart” solutions (defined here as including at least mobility or BIM) among our customers, as opposed to more traditional PC-based CMMS. The result is shown here by number of customers and by number of users.
Siveco solutions benefit from a long history, over 30 years for Coswin, over 10 years for bluebee®, 15+ years in China. As technologies keep changing, Siveco invests heavily in R&D, in France and in China, and proposes a proven upgrade path to all customers. A major upgrade of bluebee®, known as bluebee® X, was officially released in November 2020 during the Siveco annual customer event. For the mobile app, clients tend to be up-to-date thanks to more automated update features. For the back-office, adoption is not automatic: as of the date of this report, bluebee® X is used by 4 clients.
As in previous years, we keep track in particular of Coswin versions: in 2020 80% of our clients used the latest generation Coswin 8i.
Getting “Smarter” is the main motivation to upgrade to the newest version of our software. However, with 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 clients to upgrade to Coswin 8i (released in 2014).
Satisfaction with support
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. For 2020, clients continue to give positive feedback on Siveco China support, including 100% satisfaction in most areas.
In October 2019, Siveco China introduced updated cybersecurity and personal data protection procedures into its Quality Management System, in compliance with the new Chinese laws and in voluntary compliance with EU’s GDPR. In parallel we launched specific communication towards our client base to help create awareness of the new laws and see how we could help.
The result shows that only 35% of respondents, mostly large corporations, have taken decisive actions in terms of cybersecurity compliance, a very low figure considering the law applies to everyone. However, a significant number of companies is willing to take action and has since raised requests to our support team.
The ranking of support services that are considered the most valuable by customers shows that services which are not part of traditional software support are highly valued.
In 2020, many clients purchased additional training that allowed their team to become more self-sufficient with their system.
Satisfaction with products
Product satisfaction was high in 2020, in particular feedback on user experience is overall very positive. Furthermore, 100% of respondents say the system provides good support for maintenance, helps their work and 93% are willing to recommend Siveco solutions to others.
More specifically for the mobile solution bluebee®, the top three benefits are shown here:
New needs
In the 2020 survey, we also looked into customers’ new needs in terms of our Smart O&M solutions: mobility-related features came in the top 3 positions, with Electronic Document Management ex-aequo in the third position.
A specific question was dedicated to HSE in the survey, considering the strong regulatory push in the past few years and the perceived importance of the topic. Siveco has developed Risk Prevention features in bluebee® since 2010, the latest bluebee® X and Coswin 8i now also includes safety-related functions. Clients however tend to dissociate HSE from other O&M functions.
Project Delivery
For the first time this report includes a section on project delivery, for projects delivered (“Go Live”) during 2020. As per Siveco’s Quality Management System, our customers satisfaction with project delivery is ascertained by a survey at the end of project, upon acceptance of the final milestone.
In 2020, responses showed that 79% of clients considered their needs have been met in full by the end of the project. Since this survey takes place in the early phase of the support period, during which improvements will gradually take place based on the feedback-analysis loop enabled by the Smart O&M system, it is natural that certain objectives will be met later.
The end-of-project survey also looks at satisfaction with the project team performance, in four categories identified as important success factors, as shown in the following chart.
Overall feedback is good, exceeding 97% of positive responses, showing that the process the Siveco Operation Team has put in place is functioning well. Inevitably, issues are identified occasionally during projects and specific remedial actions are taken, as well as improvement actions which may include for example coaching or training for Siveco personnel.
Communication Channels
For general information about the company and its offering, we asked existing customers what were their preferred communication methods:
Customers show a strong preference (61%) for email as the medium to receive information from Siveco. The company official WeChat account and website come well behind (45% and 41% respectively).
WeChat has been a priority for Siveco for several years, all our Smart O&M newsletter being published on WeChat at the same time as on the newsletter.sivecochina.com website (relayed by email every month to subscribers).
As for workshops, in addition to Open Class Training at the Siveco Shanghai office during the year (one per quarter, open for clients under Enhanced Support) and yearly remote assessment (evaluate progress against each of the 5 steps of Siveco China ISO 55000 methodology), our yearly customer-sharing seminar was held in November 2020 in Kunshan, China, allowing clients to share their experience, their success with our approach, which combines maintenance know-how and innovative tech.
Although workshops were only listed by 21% of respondents, Siveco will pursue its regular sessions, onsite (when allowed by the Covid-19 situation) and offsite in the form of webinars.
Conclusion
As a result of this survey, improvement actions for 2021 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 will also be sent to all customers, along with a list of improvement actions taken in 2020 (based on last year’s survey) and actions planned for 2021.
