How satisfied are Microsoft customers?

The company says its own twice-yearly surveys show that strategy has borne fruit.

"We have plenty of room to improve, but overall satisfaction is at their highest levels ever," said Toby Richards, general manager for worldwide customer experience at Microsoft in an interview Monday.

Richards declined to release the results of its own surveys, which are performed by independent firms and quiz 55,000 people worldwide online and over the telephone, including 15,000 in the U.S.

But he said the surveys show satisfaction steadily rising in the past four years since Richards’ team, the Customer and Partner Experience (CPE) group, was created.

"We feel good about the progress we’ve made in the past four years," said Richards. "And in the long term, we’ve created a culture within Microsoft that is more customer and partner-centric."

For instance, Richards said that Microsoft’s decision to repeatedly delay the release of Windows Vista to tighten up its security and features was heavily influenced by survey results that showed customers asking for greater "product stability and reliability," Richards said.

Microsoft’s decisions to offer its own security software such as Windows Defender, simplify its licensing terms for enterprise software, and introduce a heavily re-engineered interface called the Ribbon for Office 2007 were also influenced by survey results, according to Christopher Frank, senior director for corporate market research at Microsoft. He declined to specify what kinds of customers or partners -- from CIOs to consumers to developers -- were most or least satisfied with Microsoft, other than to say that "the broader audiences," such as information workers and consumers, "have higher expectations, because they have to try figure out how to navigate Microsoft" for help if problems arise.

Are Steve Ballmer's babies 'ugly'?

According to an article in Computerworld from March 1999, Microsoft created its first customer service organization -- the predecessor to today’s CPE -- that year as a result of then-president Steve Ballmer’s "tireless and reportedly heavy-handed efforts to change Microsoft’s long-held reputation as a company that cares much more about shipping out boxes of software than taking care of its customers."

"It’s a very personal mission for Ballmer to get quality where it belongs," an analyst told Computerworld at the time.

Microsoft’s challenge, according to Jeanne Bliss, general manager of worldwide customer and partner loyalty at Microsoft from 1999 to 2001, was that it, like most IT companies, was a classic "product power core" firm: good at delivering products but bad at getting feedback to improve the customer experience.

For instance, Microsoft expanded its customer surveying after Bliss arrived. But getting executives to pay attention and use the results to improve their processes was more difficult.