Inside ASI-AP

Somehow I missed posting about our Q1 customer satisfaction survey so I will cover off both Q1 and Q2 in this post. While the Q2 results were slightly improved on the Q1 results - neither were great news. In fact, in Q1 we saw the lowest satisfaction numbers we have seen since we started the surveys.

The charts below show the results by question for both Q1 and Q2 separately.

Note we changed the questions slightly this year when compared to last year (see postings on 2007 results). These changes were made as a result of changes we made to the Balanced Scorecard measures to get a better understanding of satisfaction with iMIS as a product and then satisfaction with ASI and it's partners as service companies.

The questions are:

1. ASI is a stable company worthy of our organisation's long-term investment.
2. ASI understands our organisation and adds value to our mission.
3. ASI provides my organisation with modern technology.
4. ASI provides satisfactory customer support options.
5. ASI provides solutions for my organisation's critical website functions.
6. provides satisfactory consulting services.
7. Overall I am satisfied with ASI.
8. iMIS is an upgradeable product.
9. iMIS support most of my organisation's business operations.
10. iMIS products and related services are delivered on-time and on-budget.
11. iMIS products and related services are affordable and a good value over time.
12. Overall I am satisfied with iMIS.

The first block of questions (1 to 7) are about ASI and the second block of questions (8 to 12) are about iMIS. The response codes are unchanged from last year: 1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Agree, 4 = Strongly Agree and 5 = Completely Agree.

You may remember in the BSC last year we had 2 measures for customer satisfaction - one for membership organisations and one for fundraising organisations. Over the year the results were basically the same right around the world so we really did not need to keep measuring by customer sector. So instead we changed the BSC measures so that we can assess iMIS satisfaction as one measure and ASI and authorised partner (AiSP) satisfaction as the second and third measure. This approach is far better for AP as we can do a lot to drive customer satisfaction as a service company, but only have a minor impact on the iMIS product.

So while there are 12 questions in the survey, only 3 of the questions are actually measured in the BSC. The first "Overall I am satisfied with iMIS" (question 12) is the measure on iMIS satisfaction; the second measure on ASI satisfaction is from question 7 "Overall I am satisfied with ASI". And finally question 6 "[ASI or AiSP] provides satisfactory consulting services" drives the measure on satisfaction for consulting services offered by ASI and our AiSPs.

We did ask essentially the same two questions last year on iMIS and ASI satisfaction so in the following graphs you will see each of these BSC measures over the last 6 quarters (all of 2007 and the first half of 2008). You will see the drop early in 2008 and a subsequent downward trend on both lines.

So we have some work to do. The surveys don't give us enough detail on what the issues are, but I have spoken with enough customers this year personally to have a grasp on the key issues.

They are two-fold:

1. Resource availability - we haven't had enough people to cover the workload we have been selling and that customers have been demanding; this has been due to a higher demand for iMIS 15 that we had originally planned. Some tech support calls could take days to fully respond and to get some consultants the wait was over 8 weeks. And there were similar stories in customer care and sales about delays in responses. While I think we did an admirable job under the circumstances, we don't work well in chaotic situations, we abandon our strong processes, and we drop the ball.

2. High turnover of staff at customers - my own intelligence is suggesting staff turnover rates on average of 30% in our customers, and for a few customers there has been almost a 100% turnover. Combined with a lack of ASI resources as outlined in #1 above, new staff at customers (speaking generally) were not getting properly trained in iMIS and the ultimate cry from staff and their managers that do not get properly trained is "the system doesn't work".

Interesting to note in the US surveys the results continue to be strong with satisfaction over 80% and in fact the survey results are stronger in 2008 than they were in 2007. This does illustrate that the basic fundamentals at ASI are sound and that in AP we are dealing with some local issues around a tight job market and resources available at both ASI and our customers.

We are making progress however and taking care of the local issues. In consulting we have 2 extra consultants in the team full time from August and that will reduce the backlogs and wait times pretty quickly. And with Andrew coming up to speed with iMIS it will give us some desperately needed local project management coverage. I will post separately on the staff turnover issue and ongoing commitments to training.