Like the Sage Advisor Dashboard introduced last year, the new Sage Net Promotor Score Program makes data Sage has collected from customers available to partners to help them improve customer satisfaction, and their business.
Donald Deshaies, Vice President Channel Management for Sage North America
Sage North America has announced the Sage Net Promotor Score (NPS) Program for its partners, through which Sage will give partners free access to their internally collected data measuring customer satisfaction. The two metrics provided are the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures customer feedback and loyalty metrics to determine customer satisfaction level, and the likely to recommend (LTR) score. Both are updated on a quarterly basis.
Sage was already collecting this data for its own internal use, surveying each customer yearly and aggregating each partner’s responses into an NPS score that was tabulated each quarter.
“What we are doing with this program is taking these internal resources around customer insight and giving them to partners to help them build their Sage business,” said Donald Deshaies, Vice President Channel Management for Sage North America. “It is very much along the lines of how we rolled out our Sage Advisor Dashboard last year.” That Dashboard mixes CRM capabilities with the insight Sage has into its customers – such as what components they own, how and how often they use them, and how their usage compares to similar companies – and makes all of that data available to solution providers.
“Giving the NPS score on customer experience, as well as the likely to recommend score to partners, provides them with an additional additive benefit,” Deshaies said. “This is another tool that will help them grow their business in a positive way.”
Sage tested this with their Business Partner Advisory Council last April, and got feedback. Deshaies said the idea was received very well.
“This helps partners address a higher retention rate with customers, as well as a higher margin rate, greater sell-through, and efficiencies around what that creates,” Deshaies said. “The idea is to get more referrals from existing customers on the basis of customer satisfaction.”
Several vendors in the last few years have formally built customer satisfaction scores into their channel tiering programs – so that these kinds of scores have a direct impact on how much the partner gets paid. That’s not what Sage is doing here.
“Today, it is not built into the Sage Partner Program that way,” Deshaies said. “However, if these scores show partners who have a history of not doing well with customers, we want to get the partners aware of this, and educated around how to improve that, and how to apply those trends to their business.” Deshaies said that a regional manager can intervene with an outlier to take measures to get those scores up.
“There is not a penalty for poor scores through the program itself, but the real penalty is that the customer will go elsewhere,” Deshaies said.
Deshaies said that the aggregate scores have been trending very well.
“We survey each customer once a year and look for trends,” he said. “The scores have been moving upward over the year since I have been here.”
