Case Studies — AMD

AMD Surveys Customers to Maintain Innovation Leadership

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Overview

In the mid-1990s, the Quality group at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) regularly surveyed its customers. These surveys focused on understanding customer needs across attributes such as product lifetime and on-time delivery. The group used phone and postal mail surveys to ask about a hundred customers for feedback, using the responses to enhance operations. In addition, sales people handed out surveys to customers. While the feedback was valuable, the group realized they were examining only a few elements of what influences a customer to buy from AMD. They also realized that their basic survey methods would not work for an in-depth survey of AMD’s thousands of existing and potential customers. To take their survey activities to the next level, the company began its search for a survey solution provider that satisfied the following requirements: exceptionally strong survey design and results analysis, leading-edge technology, and an established track record.

Moving from an Ad Hoc to a Systematic Survey Solution

Jim Slevin, originally from the Quality group and now AMD’s Director of Customer Satisfaction, contacted and evaluated survey vendors to find the best fit. “In the end, I selected CustomerSat because they met those requirements,” he says, “but in particular it was the depth of research expertise of their staff that set them apart. We felt their survey design and methodology would be most effective in giving us a useful customer satisfaction score.”

AMD first engaged CustomerSat in 1997 to conduct its customer relationship survey and has since expanded the business relationship to include a brand perception survey. CustomerSat enabled AMD to conduct their first Web-based survey in that same year.

AMD has conducted the customer relationship survey twice a year for more than eight years. This survey queries existing customers on their overall experiences and interactions with AMD, across AMD’s product lines and service offerings. Slevin says the relationship survey replaces the “scorecards” that corporate customers and centralized vendor-management organizations gave AMD in the 1970s and 1980s.

The brand perception survey, which AMD conducted for the first time in 2003, queries senior-level decision makers on their perception of specific attributes of the AMD brand, such as technology leadership, reliability, trustworthiness and stability.

Advantages of using CustomerSat’s solution and professional services for both surveys, says Slevin, are the company’s knowledge of AMD and its business environment, and that results from both types of surveys can be stored in a single repository, enabling the company to correlate data from different audiences.

Acting on Customer Satisfaction Survey Results

AMD uses CustomerSat Professional Services and CustomerSat Enterprise to deploy its relationship survey twice each year to get feedback from nearly 7,000 customers in eight languages on AMD, its products and its business practices. The surveys typically get an excellent response rate. Survey results are reviewed by a range of AMD employees and groups, from the AMD Executive Council, which tracks a Customer Loyalty Index, to business units, which “own” AMD’s performance on specific attributes surveyed. Web page content and format, for example, are owned by Global Information Management, and on-time delivery is owned by Logistics. “Our goal is to have every attribute owned by the responsible group so they can use them to enhance customer satisfaction,” says Slevin. “If we can’t do that, why are we measuring it?”

Slevin says the tight integration between AMD and CustomerSat pays off in interpreting data from the surveys. “The data really makes sense only in the context of our business,” he says. “Because we’ve had so much continuity in CustomerSat program managers, they know our business well enough to develop explanations or hypotheses about why we get specific results. On the brand perception side, that means they work with us to tie perceptions to such factors as advertising campaigns and technology announcements. On the customer relationship side, they can make the connection, for example, that a product shortage at a specific point affected on-time delivery, which obviously affects customer satisfaction.”

AMD’s process for returning products is an example of how survey data is used to increase customer satisfaction. Customers told AMD via the surveys that the return process was not as convenient as they would like, and the company responded by streamlining IT systems, improving logistics, and adding physical return locations around the world. The next step, says Slevin, is for the company to measure satisfaction with the enhanced process.

AMD also inputs the results of its surveys into its customer relationship management (CRM) system from Salesforce.com. The sales staff can see results down to the individual contact at a customer and can compare historical results. Customers are categorized according to their level of satisfaction using the Harvard Business School “Apostle” model to segment customers according to their attitudes about satisfaction and loyalty.

Measuring and Interpreting Perceptions of the AMD Brand

To help shape its marketing strategy, AMD also uses CustomerSat to design and conduct a brand perception survey of about 600 senior-level decision makers regarding brand attributes and thought-leadership positions. This high-level survey assesses how senior executives, partners, distributors, retailers, and hardware and software vendors—the AMD “ecosystem”—rate AMD on critical brand attributes relative to its competition. AMD and CustomerSat jointly analyze the research findings. AMD uses the results to reinforce or modify brand perceptions and associations to appeal more strongly to OEM customers.

Delivering Credible, Defensible Customer Satisfaction Data

Among the key benefits of working with CustomerSat, says Slevin, is that the data he delivers from an independent research firm is highly credible and defensible. “This is a company of engineers, who challenge everything,” he says. “The detailed results from CustomerSat enable anyone to drill down into the data as far as they want—down to individual responses. There’s nothing hidden about the objectives, the process, or the results.”

CustomerSat’s rigorous and comprehensive processes pay other dividends. For instance, using CustomerSat and establishing a process for enhancing customer satisfaction has enabled AMD business units to satisfy the customer feedback requirement for QS-9000 certification, the common supplier quality standard for DaimlerChrysler Corporation, Ford Motor Company, and General Motors Corporation.

The long-term relationship between AMD and CustomerSat has enabled AMD to develop a survey methodology that serves the needs of the multiple stakeholders in the company and provides data the company can use to fulfill its pledge to be a “customer-centric innovator.” According to Slevin, “CustomerSat has continued to add functionality to remain a leader in survey technology and expertise, and meet our evolving needs at AMD. The data their surveys deliver enables us to keep enhancing our brand perception and improving customer satisfaction levels.”