Read this article about IBM, one of our finalists, in the category Best Achievement in Operational Excellence to deliver an outstanding Customer Experience Excellence, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2019 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program. Click here to read articles on other finalists.

IBM’s Partner Ecosystem organizational strategy is to build, nurture and grow a thriving ecosystem where IBM Business Partners (BPs) provide solutions, services and value based skills to enable client success. Our team collaborated with Medallia to implement the IBM BP Compass Net Promoter Score program. This digital global survey platform provides real time metrics on survey results, a Closed-Loop Feedback process and text analytics insights on written verbatim comments.  We implemented two survey programs to acquire feedback: end-clients’ satisfaction with their BP and with IBM, as well as a BP survey program on their relationship with IBM. Together, these two surveys provide a 360-degree view of the IBM Channel ecosystem.

The BP survey program is triggered by different interactions:

1. BP Relationship feedback is captured twice yearly on overall satisfaction and Likelihood to Recommend IBM.
2. Moment of Truth Surveys: Event driven surveys triggered real time across key engagement points in the BPs’ journey with IBM.
   
   

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company to others.  Respondents answer likelihood to recommend on a 0-10 scale, which defines 3 categories of responders:

• Detractors: Unhappy customers who do not promote your brand and could impact through negative word of mouth.
• Passives: Satisfied but unenthusiastic customers susceptible to competition.
• Promoters: Vocal repeat customers with low rates of churn and high lifetime value.
  
  

Our BPs are embracing NPS to share their feedback. IBM has sent over 31,600 survey invitations to >3000 BPs across 98 countries within the initial 8 months of the program. With a 17% response rate and >5400 verbatims, we have powerful insights to improve collaboration and strengthen our Channel ecosystem.

In order to maximize the benefits from such significant feedback volume, over 600 global employees and >200 BP contacts have been enabled as “Alert Owners” who execute our comprehensive Closed Loop Feedback (CLF) process.  The Alert Owner immediately (within 24 hours) acknowledges the survey response, engages with the survey responder to understand the issue and takes appropriate action. Our Partner Ecosystem organization can then better define pervasive insights and key focus areas to increase promoters of IBM in the marketplace and in parallel, share with the BPs the improvements we are implementing from their feedback.

We categorized all verbatims into specific outerloop themes for Global/Local Executive oversight and engagement with our Global Transformation leadership to align this feedback directly to our strategic transformation roadmap.

Our external communication message: “You Spoke, We Listened”, allows our BPs to understand what we are doing with their feedback to enhance their experience.

The results within the first 6 months have proven to be a success! We recognized a +22 point improvement on our Relationship NPS survey and a +14 point improvement across our Moment of Truth Surveys.