Hi All,

Some very important information below about our Global Relationship Survey

Some of you will have received a survey in the last 24 hours asking you to rate your experience of Microsoft and feedback on specific products, programmes, or benefits available.

This is the Microsoft Global Relationship Survey (GRS) – which we send out to Partners and customers every 6 months to gauge how well we are delivering against Partner and Customer expectations, GRS also gives great insight into specific issues or areas of concerns and allows us to shape policy and strategy in order to address these.  The responses to the survey genuinely shape the direction of Microsoft as a company.

The survey takes about 10-15 minutes to complete – depending on how much detail you go into.  Please give as much feedback in the relevant section of the survey for products or programmes you work with, and qualify any concerns with as much detail as you can – this will ensure your feedback goes to the right part of Microsoft so it can be acted on. 

Marking the first question ‘Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft’ negatively because of a specific issue makes it hard to know what that specific issue is, limiting what we can do to rectify the problem.  So if you are generally happy with the relationship with Microsoft but hate SharePoint (sorry SharePoint) please mark your Overall Satisfaction With Microsoft as ‘Very Satisfied’ (somewhat satisfied is not considered a positive response) and then really go to town on why you hate SharePoint – this will then get fed back to the SharePoint product team.

Last time around you communicated four main areas you were not happy with:

  • You wanted more leads for small Partners through PinPoint
  • You wanted the Partner Learning Centre to be easier to use
  • You wanted more training for Volume Licensing
  • You wanted us to make it easier to make money from Cloud as an SMB

This lead to changes across the business, and specific changes from me and my team included:

  • We are taking a regional approach to PinPoint for our smaller Partners – making it easier for SMBs to generate leads and revenue at a local level
  • We are creating a new interface for finding training directly through the Partner Portal and competency planner tool – negating the need to search directly through the PLC. 
  • Event registration is now through Worldwide Events wherever possible (rather than the PLC) – this is a considerably better experience for Partners.
  • We are now communicating all of our most relevant training offerings out to smaller Partners, tailoring these by Partner type – so we only communicate the most relevant (and mostly free of charge) training to you.
  • We have setup a new Online Cloud tool that allows you to track your progress through Cloud programmes such as Cloud Essentials, access sales and marketing resources, training and more. 
  • We also now have dedicated points of contact for Cloud opportunities based in our Reading office – so if you’re a member of Cloud Essentials or Cloud Accelerate you can pick up the phone and talk your opportunity through and get additional support from the Online team at Microsoft UK

If you have any questions about any of the above – feel free to drop me an email at alex.kureen@microsoft.com

Have a great week!

Alex