Customers name Microsoft most trusted smart-city vendor
Every company strives to earn their customers’ trust and satisfaction. That’s why our CityNext team is gratified and humbled by the results of the recent IDC Survey Spotlight1, which names Microsoft the top-scored company on questions of trust and customer satisfaction in enabling smart-city digital transformations.
The spotlight is an excerpt of IDC’s Smart City MaturityScape Benchmark Survey2, which surveyed 151 U.S. local government organizations on the capabilities of 15 technology vendors. IDC, a well-respected analyst firm, asked a series of questions, with 1 being the lowest score and 5 reflecting the highest. Microsoft achieved top rankings of 4.35 and 4.39 on trust and customer satisfaction, respectively. “Microsoft was the top-scored vendor in both questions,” notes the IDC Survey Spotlight. “IDC believes that (Microsoft’s) satisfied installed base, coupled with its extensive work on building cloud capabilities, analytics and a smart-city partner ecosystem for its CityNext product have had a large effect.”
A credit to Microsoft partners
We are grateful to receive this form of customer feedback because it acknowledges not only Microsoft but our CityNext partners, who have the deep expertise needed to empower more sustainable, prosperous and inclusive cities. Whether its traffic congestion, citizen services, energy efficiency or operating costs, our Microsoft CityNext partners are equipped to tackle whatever problem or priority local governments want to address. Microsoft’s IDC smart-city scores are really a credit to our partners, which leverage our trusted cloud platform, powerful data analytics, security and privacy infrastructures, and other advanced capabilities to enable smart-city innovations such as these:
- Municipality of Hollands Kroon: Microsoft and our CityNext partner Sparked helped this Dutch city completely transform its organizational structure and deploy cloud solutions that empower employees to do their best work whenever, wherever and however they want. Citizen satisfaction is up 34 percent, employee morale is up, absences and costs are down, and the city is working to use digitized information to improve decision-making and deliver better citizen services.
- Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve: A Belgian municipality, deployed Opisense, an Azure–based solution, to monitor energy usage in its buildings and meet its commitment of becoming a carbon-neutral city by 2050. Developed by Microsoft CityNext Partner Opinum, Opisense offers an intuitive and cost-efficient way to measure power consumption. Now, the city has cut energy accounting time by 80 percent, reduced energy usage by 25 to 31 percent in monitored buildings, and can more easily analyze and share relevant data.
Trust at the core of CityNext
The IDC measurements are important to us because trust sits at the core of our CityNext initiative, which helps city leaders engage citizens, empower employees, optimize operations, and ttransform their cities to become safer, healthier, better educated and more sustainable. In every conversation with city leaders, we talk about trust because it’s vital to delivering new digital experiences, services and accessibility to end users. Municipal leaders and employees, partners and Microsoft need to work together to earn citizen trust in the services being provided. While this “chain of trust” might sound easy, it’s anything but. That’s why it’s rewarding that governments surveyed by IDC gave Microsoft and our partners such high marks for trust, which also is the first principle of A Cloud for Global Good, the set of Microsoft policy recommendations that provides a roadmap for a trusted, responsible and inclusive cloud.
Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is a goal of every company and we’re thrilled to receive the top score. To us, this means that local governments view Microsoft and our partners as problem-solvers, who deliver high-impact solutions that meet or exceed expectations. We are working hard to be a strategic partner to cities, helping to address problems and make priorities a reality.
We’ve been working with cities for nearly 30 years and Microsoft CityNext was launched in 2013 to put even greater emphasis on this important work. The IDC trust and customer satisfaction survey results show that we’re on the right track to continue helping cities and citizens unlock their potential, and create smarter, more vibrant places to live, work and play!
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1Source: IDC Survey Spotlight, Who Are The Most Trusted Vendors for US Smart City Transformation, January 2017.
2Source: IDC MaturityScape Benchmark: Smart Cities in the United States, 2017, Ruthbea Yesner Clarke, May 2017.
