Siveco China Customer Satisfaction Survey 2013

An unusual topic for our monthly Reliability article: we will look into the results of our yearly customer satisfaction survey and the interesting findings it reveals.

Customer satisfaction has always been at the core of Siveco China’s business, as our business purpose is to help customers achieve maintenance improvement, preferably in the form of measurable ROI.

In early 2013 we have launched our ISO 9001 certification project, with the aim to get certified during 2014. New procedures were implemented during 2013 and internal audits are conducted on a regular basis (we now have 7 certified ISO 9001 internal auditors in the company, which is around 15% of our staff).

As part of ISO 9001 requirements, a yearly Customer Satisfaction survey must be conducted.

For the first survey, we selected an independent third-party team of consultants from EMLyon Business School Asia Campus in Shanghai to run the survey for us, to ensure an unbiased analysis of our customers’ satisfaction and expectations. The survey took place from September to December 2013, with an online questionnaire sent to all our customers, after which results were analyzed and presented by our third-party survey team.

The online questionnaire comprised three main parts:

The survey covered the entire Siveco China customer base (around 80 clients covering 800 sites), reached several persons for each client (or site) – for example maintenance manager, CMMS administrator, general manager. The study deliberately excluded ongoing projects (i.e. unfinished projects) to focus on past projects or customers under long-term contracts (typically support contracts). Our Customer Support team is now in charge of coordinating improvement actions with relevant departments of the company.

The following charts provide some insight into our customers’ background in terms of industry sectors, position of the respondent (note that several persons from the same company may have responded and “others” typically denote top management positions), type of contract with Siveco (note that most customers have several contract types for example system implementation and support) and language used (some respondents were foreigners, typically top managers in foreign companies).

Overall customer feedback was very positive, with 100% of our customers declaring they would recommend Siveco solutions to their network, a strong indicator of trust – for which are thankful to our clients! More detailed responses are shown in the following charts.

Another very positive feedback was that our customers rank project success factors in an order that validates our approach, based on maintenance expertise rather than IT. IT expertise ranks very low as a success factor.

Specific questions on the maintenance engineering services provided by Siveco confirmed their importance as success factors for CMMS and maintenance improvement projects.

Specific questions covered support contracts, showing first of all that 1/3rd of respondents are not clear under which type of contract their company is covered.

Customers were asked to rank the elements of support contracts by importance, focused on software support. The top three responses are shown below:

Several questions were focused on Enhanced Support Contracts, showing the benefits of this approach to maintenance improvement though regular coaching using the CMMS as a support tool.

Customers were also asked to rank additional services they would like to see included in our support contracts.

The results proved particularly interesting, as customers often remove such services during contract negotiation, for cost reasons. Top management usually assumes that such services are not needed and that their teams should have the necessary knowhow to be self-sufficient.

We also asked our customers what services they would expect from Siveco in the future, for existing facilities as well as for new facilities:

All in all, the results show strong needs for maintenance engineering services in relation to the CMMS, as well as mobile solutions. Both have already been focus areas for Siveco China for many years, but are too often removed by customers during contract negotiation (in part because our competitors do not offer such services). The survey shows customers should consider these aspects carefully during contract discussions.

Finally a question was asked about the “Maintenance in China” newsletter, which showed that 1/4th of customers did not receive it.

After comparing responses with the respondents’ positions, we see that readers in top management positions are in general more interested in the Siveco newsletter than engineers or IT staff. Similarly, foreign readers (usually in management positions at multinationals) are more interested than local readers. This perhaps reflects the newsletter current focus on improvement topics rather than pure technical issues.

Several survey questions listed in this report have shown that customers are not always aware of Siveco’s service offering, which confirms the need for this newsletter and constant information sharing with our entire contact network.

The results of the 2013 Customer Satisfaction Survey are overall very satisfying (100% of respondents would recommend Siveco to their network). We would like thank all our customers for their trust and friendly cooperation over the years!

The survey also shows that Siveco China’s emphasis on maintenance engineering, in the form of consulting services and the Enhanced Support Contracts, is correct and should be further emphasized. Indeed, customers who initially rejected such services (usually for cost reasons) are the first to emphasize this need.

Similarly, additional support services should be provided, such as report development, additional training, onsite service days, etc.

We will pay great attention to the results of this customer satisfaction survey for our actions in 2014, including changes and improvements in our support offering and better communication towards our customers, through our newsletter but also at all stages of the project lifecycle (sales, project, support).

Thank again to all respondents!

Tags： Customer Satisfaction Survey