Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Building Great Customer Experiences - PTC's Customer Satisfaction Initiative

"Profits are earned through the success of partners not at their expense"

Background and Objectives
Over the past four years, PTC has rolled out several strategic initiatives focused on serving our customers more effectively, improving performance, and achieving our business objectives. The theme, Making it easy to do business with PTC, continues to drive our customer-focused activities. Our Customer Satisfaction Survey enables us to:

• Measure customers satisfaction with PTC products and services
• Identify and prioritize what changes to make
• Measure improvement
• Build a culture focused on customer success

It is very important that PTC understands how our of customers feel about the experience that they have with PTC. This means that we need to understand how different groups of individuals within our customer base feel about their experience with PTC. To address this PTC is using a number of different approaches to understand and drive improvements in Customer Satisfaction:

Relationship Survey

The Relationship survey is a quarterly survey of our customers, which is driven by Strategic Account Managers (SAMs). The survey is specifically focussed on establishing the views of key customer decision makers. Invitees are asked to complete a Web-based survey two times per year. After the survey, SAMs work with respondents to identify ways in which the Relationship with PTC can be improved.

Independent Project Quality Assessment

The Independent Project Quality Assessment (IPQA), is an interview based assessment of the Quality of projects that are delivered by the Global Services Team. The assessment is focussed on the Customer Project Manager, and the interview is conducted once the implementation is complete but before the customer "Go Live" of the project. Questions are focussed on Sales; Services and Product quality. Account teams use the results of the IPQA to understand the customer's satisfaction with projects. In addition systemic issues are identified in Root Cause meetings, which in turn drive corrective actions to improve project quality going forward.

User Survey

It is important that PTC understand how end users feel about PTC Products and support services and therefore users are invited to complete a web-based survey once per year. Twenty five percent of the total customer list are invited to complete the survey each quarter. Invitees will recieve an email inviting them to follow a link to our survey partner (Satmetrix) website to complete the PTC User Survey. The main focus of this survey is to establish how satisfied users are with PTC products and Technical Support services. The results of this survey are used to drive improvement initiatives in Product Development and Technical Support. The web-based survey is offered in: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Spanish so that we ensure global participation. Register here to participate in future surveys.

PTC Customer Satisfaction Scorecard

In FY05 we have achieved all of our Goals for Customer Satisfaction:

• Relationship Survey - achieved our corporate goal for customer satisfaction and achieved strong improvements in the following relationship related areas:
  • Responsiveness and Professionalism of the sales team
  • Easy to communicate with and effectively listens to concerns
  • Follows through on commitments
• IPQA - achieved an outstanding rating with 80% of customers being very satisfied with implementation projects and achieved strong improvements in the following Product and Services related areas:
  • Product Issues
    • Major Software Quality
    • Software functionality
    • Software fixes
  • Service Issues
    • Scoping
    • Project Management
    • Change Management
• User Survey - achieved strong improvements in the following Product and Support Related Issues
  • Satisfaction with Product:
    • Quality of product
    • Reliability of products
    • Range of product line
  • Satisfaction with Technical Support:
    • Technical Knowledge of Support Personnel
    • Responsiveness of Support Personnel
    • Timely Status Updates

In summary, the customer feedback from the FY05 surveys shows strong improvement in our Relationships with customers. We continue to identify improvement areas based on the feedback we receive from our customers.

Improvement Actions
A senior-level cross-functional team responding to the findings of the Customer Satisfaction survey drives improvement in technology, process, and customer relations across all parts of PTC. Major initiatives currently underway include:

• The Customer Care Center
  To make it easier to do business with PTC we now provide one number to call for all your Maintenance, Order Management, Contracts, Credit, Distribution, License Management, Training, and Consulting Services needs
• Sales and Management Compensation
  A portion of sales and management compensation is now linked to achieving customer satisfaction goals, which aligns all organizations at PTC to our efforts to continuously improve customer satisfaction.
• Post-Sale Support
  To ensure that customers experience a smooth transition from purchase and implementation to a long-term support environment we have introduced a post-sale "Care Days" program. This program is designed to help our customers get the most value from PTC and become self-sufficient in the use of PTC products and services.
• Customer Relationship Management
  To become more customer-focused PTC has implemented customer relationship training and a customer relationship management (CRM) system. The training program is designed to improve the customer-interaction skills of our sales and service teams. The CRM system allows us to capture customer knowledge and relationship history reducing the dependency on personal knowledge.
• Customer Interaction and Advisory Boards
  PTC has increased its utilization of customers, organized as technical committees, as an integral part of our Product Development Process. Visit www.ptcuser.org for more information on technical committee participation. Additionally, our Customer Advisory Board helps us to define our strategic direction and product strategy.
• Implementation Quality Audits
  Independent reviews of implementation projects to ensure quality of delivery. Followed by Root Cause Analysis to identify areas for improvement and to identify Corrective Actions.
• Revised Problem Escalation Processes
  Enhanced escalation process to highlight customer problems to the senior management team to drive rapid resolution.
• Single Face to the Customer
  Working to align our responsiveness to your concerns across departments.

People are noticing the changes "Judging by the presentations made to the PTC/USER Board, PTC is working on the "right" issues -- the ones that matter most to customers. Software quality, customer satisfaction, and interoperability of its products are just a few of the areas where PTC appears to be making progress. Much work remains but the trend is positive".

"It seems that PTC is making sincere and concerted efforts to solve customer complaints and to move to a truly customer-centric model for running its business. For those of us who rely on PTC technology, this is a welcome change and we can only encourage its continuance".

Summary

PTC continues to evolve Customer Experience Management processes to enable us to assess, measure and drive improvements in order to achieve our on-going commitment to achieving higher levels of customer satisfaction. This scorecard details PTC's latest satisfaction ratings and highlights the progress made against actions announced in prior reports.

We look forward to enhanced relationships with our customers as the initiatives we implement make it easier to do business with PTC.

Sincerely,
Mark Hodges
Operations Divisional Vice President
PTC

Participate in future Customer Satisfaction Surveys.