Tomorrow I’ll be leading a webcast to share the results of my 2013 Member Technology Survey. The webcast is open to everyone, and all attendees will receive a copy of my 2013 Technology Heatmap research report, so please register and attend! I wanted to give a sneak preview of some of the survey highlights. The survey covers 24 categories of tools used by service organizations, tracking the adoption, satisfaction, and planned spending for each category. In addition to technology, I also have categories for outsourcing/service providers and business consultants.
First of all, a big thank you to everyone who took the time to fill out the survey. We had a stretch goal of 500 responses, and we receive many more than that. It is a great data set and I really appreciate the time involved in completing the survey. We had a good distribution of responses across support, field service, professional services and education services; as well as a good showing–about a third of responses–from Europe.
A number of technology categories saw increases over 2012 adoption numbers, including areas with high planned spending last year which tells me that spending materialized. In particular, we saw big increases in adoption of professional services automation (PSA), analytic platforms, communities for customers and employees, and outsourcing.
Satisfaction levels were low again this year, and I have a theory about this I’m going to test in tomorrow’s webcast. Tune in and find out my hypothesis! The lowest rated category was contract management tools, with an average of 3.29 on a 5 point scale. I’ve discussed this with Julia Stegman, our VP of research for service revenue generation (SRG), and we think this indicates that legacy contract tools may be good for entitlement, but they do a lousy job of automating the renwals process, and a number of specialists are now dominating this side of contract management. I’m considering splitting contract management into 2 categories (entitlement management and renwals management) for the 2014 survey to get more granular information in this area.
Of course I’d like to mention that the satisfaction ratings were not all gloom and doom. A number of our partners received 4.0 ratings or higher, including the finalists in our TechBEST Best in Satisfaction awards presented a couple of weeks ago at TSW Santa Clara: Citrix, DB Kay & Associates, and MARKETii. The winner was DB Kay, with an average satisfaction score of 4.44. Excellent job and big congrats to David Kay and Jennifer Crippen, who do such great work with our members.
I will close the webcast with a look at planned spending for 2013-2014, revealing which areas have the highest planned spending by members. Last year saw record planned spending, and this year’s results are almost as high. Nearly half of the survey categories reported planned spending by 50% or more of survey respondents, and each of these areas has a direct tie to improving productivity and/or generating revenue.
Again, here’s the link to register for tomorrow’s 9am PT webcast. Hope to see you there! And as always, thanks for reading!
Ragsdale’s Eye on Service 