Satisfaction by design

As the product life cycle gets shorter and shorter, and the stakes get higher and higher, designers of integrated circuits face enormous pressure to come up with new and better creations.

Electronic design automation (EDA) software helps them do that. One of the largest companies in the EDA field is Synopsys, Inc. It produces software and other tools used by designers of integrated circuits for a wide range of industries and applications, including computers, consumer electronics and industrial control systems. Worldwide, more than 5,000 designers use the company's products.

Founded in 1986, Synopsys has grown steadily from a $250,000 start-up with nine employees to revenues last year of $196 million and a staff of over 1,000. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and Beaverton, Ore., the company has offices around the world.

Realizing that its success depends on a relatively small number of customers, Synopsys began a customer satisfaction research program in 1993. "You have to understand our industry," says Jeff Moller, director of operations and quality for Synopsys. "Many companies don't survive beyond the first generation of their software. Our goal is not to suffer from that tendency, and the way to do that is to make sure customers really like us. Higher customer satisfaction will have a lot to do with the longevity of the technology companies."

Moller says the company was already getting feedback on its performance from customers but much of it was anecdotal. "Every customer visit produces a data point. The problem is, it's difficult to synthesize those data points into something that shows a trend. The only way you can understand your trends, whether you're getting better or worse or holding steady, is by doing something more pervasive."

The company wanted a more systematic way of gathering information from its customers, Moller says. "We felt we didn't have a good statistical grasp of their needs. We knew a lot about them but we couldn't correlate information from one customer to another. So there were two things we needed to do better. First, we wanted a more rigid methodology to collect data that could be turned into actionable information. Second, we wanted customers to be surveyed independently so they could speak freely and provide us with honest, valuable information to drive meaningful change."

Search for experience

With a firm idea of what it wanted to accomplish, Synopsys interviewed a number of research companies, looking for one with international research experience and capabilities in the business-to-business area, specifically high-tech. Burke Customer Satisfaction Associates (CSA), Cincinnati, filled the bill.

During 1993 and 1994 Burke CSA conducted one-on-one telephone interviews with integrated chip designers and managers in the United States, Germany and Japan. The interviews, which lasted about 20 minutes, were conducted in each respondent's native language by Burke CSA representatives in the respective countries.

The ability to conduct the interviews in the respondent's language from local offices was one of Synopsys' requirements for its research vendor. "That was a big differentiator between Burke and the other companies," Moller says. "A lot of research firms said they could do it but they hadn't ever done it before or had very little experience with it and that was one of the things that was mandatory for us because of our diverse customer base," Moller says.

"You really have to do the interviews in their language," says Steve Benjamin, Burke CSA consultant. "It shows consideration for the customers. You're asking them to help you so it's the least you can do.

"Many of the designers we interviewed for Synopsys are educated in English and work in English but we have learned that they have difficulty with some of the softer issues that you need to get into to measure customer satisfaction in English, so it was imperative to speak to them in their own language."

Make it convenient

As with most business-to-business research situations, a key concern was to make participating in the research convenient for the respondents. "The customers of Synopsys are very busy people," Benjamin says. "They are the superstars of their business, so they're very hard to get a hold of. They won't fill out a written survey; you won't be able to get detailed information from a mail survey because you have to make it brief to get them to fill it out. And in-person visits would be far too expensive.

"In general for business-to-business applications, we find that telephone is the way to go. Respondents are willing to do it in a 20-minute interview. It's customer-friendly and we do the interviews in their language."

The interviews covered product quality, performance, integrity, licensing agreements and pricing policies, customer support and training, and the sales staff.

Earned goodwill

Because the EDA industry didn't have an outstanding record of soliciting customer opinions, Synopsys earned goodwill by making the effort to listen to its customers. "We found their customers weren't used to being asked what they wanted," says Benjamin. "So the mere act of asking produces positive results. It sent the message that their customers' information is driving the way Synopsys does business.

"We learned that Synopsys was performing well relative to its competitors. But we also learned the industry is not known for paying attention to customers' needs. We had to dig deeper to understand their needs and requirements and how Synopsys could address them."

The research found that some of the customers who had service contracts did not understand the value of their contracts. As a result, Synopsys developed a new service that more clearly demonstrates its value.

The company also found that customers were having trouble finding information within its software manuals. Additional interviews with customers uncovered more information and led Synopsys to introduce Solvit!, an on- line help product that gives customers access to all of the company's documentation 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In addition, research found that customers placed a lot of value on a predictable release schedule. So Synopsys refined its release procedures to make sure new releases come out when they are scheduled to.

Different expectations

The research confirmed that there were a number of differences in the expectations of the German, Japanese and U.S. customers. "We'd been hearing about these differences from our people in these regions, but we found it really helped to have an independent consultant define the issues," says Moller.

"Here is a company that is making a product that's being sold worldwide and the people who are buying the product are all buying it for same reason, or so it seems," Benjamin says. "And yet when we measured these 40-odd attributes and looked at the importance of the attributes and performance, in many cases we ended up with differences."

For example, the research showed that U.S. designers want to be the first to have the newest technology. They don't care that the software may have some bugs or the documentation might not be complete. They're the equivalent of test pilots who are willing to risk a crash in order to be the first to try a new program that can take them to new heights.

German customers, on the other hand, look at Synopsys products as productivity enhancers. Technology issues aren't as important to them. German firms want their designers to have tools that will help them do more effective, productive work. "They want to hear about performance, ease of use and overall quality and reliability," Benjamin says.

"It was clear to us that what motivates the German customer, the Japanese customer and the U.S. customer are significantly different and hence one cure does not solve all. If you're doing one thing, not all customers are going to buy-in," Moller says.

"Isolating the needs of the individual markets allows people within the company to tune their delivery programs and their customer satisfaction efforts to the needs of those local areas," Benjamin says.

"It also tends to sensitize the corporation itself," Moller adds. "People from the overseas branches will tell the company, 'You can't give us a U.S. solution. It won't be accepted here.' And the company doesn't always understand what that means. If you can go back and support that with some quantifiable data, it helps sensitize people to the issue. You can quote text until you're blue in the face. But it becomes much more persuasive when they're reading feedback from the customer and it's summarized in a fashion that they can understand and internalize."

Don't compare

Moller says that for companies that have overseas divisions, it's critical not to compare the customer satisfaction scores of branches in different countries. "Different cultures grade differently. You can't sum the results up together when you're done. You have to look at things in relative terms. You almost have to create your own baseline for each culture."

Steve Benjamin: "We continually remind our clients when we do international work that countries are like children - you love them all and you treat them individually.

"We generally find that clients stay out of the comparison game. They don't use the research results as a hammer and ask one division, for example, 'Why aren't you performing like the others?' That approach creates a lot of unnecessary anxiety and never gets you the behavior that you want," Benjamin says.

Verbatims don't correlate

The interviews included an open-ended question that asked the respondents what Synopsys could do to increase their overall level of satisfaction. Benjamin says that the verbatim responses are always interesting and helpful, though the opinions expressed in them don't typically correlate to actual satisfaction drivers.

"The verbatim comments won't agree with analysis of what's driving behavior but it's really useful to have them because they're the kinds of things that management and the salespeople are hearing. But just because you hear something doesn't mean it's driving behavior. When presenting this information to our clients we say, 'You've probably been hearing about price a lot - customers say you're charging too much.' But when you look at key drivers, usually price doesn't come up. That's the difference between what customers say and what drives their behavior."

In addition, respondents were asked if there were any areas of concern or issues that they would like someone from Synopsys to contact them about, be it product information or some other need. "If the respondent said yes, we immediately faxed that over to Synopsys and they would arrange to follow up and get the customer what they need," Benjamin says. "We didn't get many of those, but it's a nice thing to do, and it's an opportunity to respond to the customer immediately and show them that you're taking this seriously."

Key customers

Customer satisfaction research in the business-to-business realm may be even more important than it is in the consumer product world. Most consumer product or service firms have many thousands or even millions of customers but an industrial firm may have a small number of key customers who are vitally important to the firm's survival.

Benjamin: "You really have to understand what the big guys are thinking, because at the end of the day the primary benefit of [satisfaction] programs is customer retention. A secondary benefit is customer acquisition. If you do a higher quality job with your existing customers the word will get around and you'll get more new customers. It's not the same as marketing for new customers. So if your primary objective is retention, you want to retain the largest customers.

"The business-to-business relationship is more complex: it's not one person buying from one company. When you do business with another company you interact with three or four different kinds of people. For Synopsys, the customer isn't just the company, it's four or five people at the company - the designer, the manager of the department, who is literally making career decisions on which software he's going to use, the procurement people, and the CFO. You've got a much more complicated relationship, which means you have to talk to a wide bandwidth of people to understand what different people are looking for."

Benjamin says that Burke CSA's high-tech clients are the most inquisitive about research methodology. The people at Synopsys were no different. "They wanted to know where we got the information, how much they could rely on it, etc. Once you demonstrate that you have done a thorough job and can support your recommendations, they take them to heart, which is really what you want because that's when action happens."