Over the past few weeks you’ve probably seen and/or heard some very exciting sets of results shared out by the leadership here at Microsoft, all which point to a great year with our partners. Now, it’s your chance to help tell us how to make it even better again this year!

On July 19th we announced that Microsoft Reports Record Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year Revenue. What is really exciting about this is that being a partner-led business, when we report record results, it means that we’ve done so through all of you, our Microsoft partners, which means growth for our partners!

Then, for those of you at Worldwide Partner Conference or who joined us online through Digital WPC to watch it, you heard Kevin Turner announce in his keynote address at Worldwide Partner Conference, we have achieved all-time high levels of partner satisfaction this past year! Woohoo! Also, you heard him mention that Customer and Partner Experience (CPE) is a core pillar of what we do here at Microsoft. It is what we wake up and think about daily (and it is what I do in my role and what our whole CPE Team worldwide does each and every day). If you read my Microsoft CPE – Working to Increase Customer and Partner Satisfaction and Experience post shortly after I moved into my role as Worldwide Director of Partner Experience, you got to see more about CPE here at Microsoft. You can also learn more about our Customer and Partner Experience efforts and focus here at Microsoft in our CPE Executive Summary from Steve Ballmer as well as our CPE White Paper.

As I have said many times before (and you heard Kevin Turner and Steve Ballmer reiterate it at Worldwide Partner Conference), WE LOVE OUR PARTNERS, so seeing you all grow not only in revenue but also in satisfaction year over year is incredibly exciting! When I stepped into my role three years ago, my manager and I set some goals for where we wanted to be in three years, and now, here we are three years later and it is amazing to see those results come to fruition with all of you!

Just like everything else here at Microsoft, with the new year (our fiscal year starts July 1), it is now time to do it all over again, with all of you. From a revenue perspective, as you heard at Worldwide Partner Conference, we have the most exciting lineup of offerings in market and coming to market over the next 12 – 18 months in our company’s history! With that in mind, there is no better time to set sights on an incredible year of growth for all of our partners and businesses here in FY13.

From a satisfaction perspective, we do a worldwide measure of our customer and partner satisfaction (in addition to ongoing listening all year long) twice a year in our Global Relationship Study, where we receive responses from tens of thousands of partners from around the world. The first of these surveys is coming to market at the end of September, and as always, I would love to make sure that we hear from even MORE of you this round. As such, I am going to share some tips with you to help you ensure your voice is more likely to be included in the Global Relationship Study (GRS) this wave:

• Make sure that you add “Microsoft Feedback (feedback@e-mail.microsoft.com)” to your safe senders list in your spam filters. This is the alias that the survey gets sent out from and if you don’t add it to your safe senders list, there is a chance that it could get picked up and blocked by your spam filter, which means you would never receive your chance to give your feedback in the GRS Survey.
• Make sure that your information is correct in Partner Membership Center. If your information is not complete or correct, you won’t be included in the survey. At a minimum, please ensure you have completed and have the correct information in the following fields for your profile:
  • Name (First and Last)
  • Job Title
  • Company Name
  • Address
  • Country
  • Email Address
    • FYI: Generic email addresses are not included in our GRS survey (Sales@XYZ.com, Info@XYZ.com, Microsoft@XYZ.com, Marketing@XYZ.com, etc.), so please ensure you have an individual email listed in your profile so you can be included
• If you have a Partner Account Manager (PAM) or Tele-Partner Account Manager (TPAM), please ensure your information above is correct/completed as noted above and inform your PAM or TPAM to ensure that your record is up to date with the items listed above in the Managed Partner List.
• Every contact from our Managed and Tele-Managed partners is included in the GRS Survey (assuming your information is completed) and for our Non-Managed partners (those without PAMs or TPAMs), we do a random sampling of tens of thousands of partner contacts (of those whose contact information is completed as noted above) from around the world each wave so we get a wide variety each time. Also, because there are hundreds of thousands of partners in the Microsoft Partner Network, we can’t physically include every contact there is each wave.
• What I can tell you is this, regardless is you are Managed, Tele-Managed, or Non-Managed, if your contact information is not populated and correct, you won’t be included in the GRS survey, so PLEASE ensure your information is correct.

If you do receive the GRS Survey from us (between September 24th and October 18th for this upcoming wave), please take the time to complete the survey and please give us your open and honest feedback. We absolutely want to know what you are thinking about all aspects of your relationship with Microsoft, and you will see that the survey is broken into sections such as: Your Partner Account Team (if you are a Managed or Tele-Managed Partner), the Microsoft Partner Network, Quality of Resources, Quality of Tech Support, Quality of Products, Ease of Doing Business, and more). The survey should take about 11-13 minutes on average to complete, but there are several open-ended questions where you can share as much information as you would like with us, and I would highly encourage you to do so. We read each and every response we get to the survey and use it across all of our teams and with all levels of Executive Management here at Microsoft to inform each and every one about what our audiences think and feel.

Thank you again for everything you do each and every day as Microsoft partners! It is an honor and privilege to get to connect with, speak with, and work with you all every day and I look forward to another incredible year ahead of us.

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Thank you and have a wonderful day,

Eric Ligman – Follow me on TWITTER, LinkedIn, and RSS and see “What I’m thinking”
Director, Worldwide Partner Experience
Microsoft Corporation
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights