Editor’s note: Jeff Mercer is a senior director at technology company Microsoft. Katherine Costain is a director at Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Customer and Partner Experience (CPE) Relationship study is one of the largest satisfaction tracking programs in the world. It surveys Microsoft’s customers and partners – from small businesses to global enterprise companies. It’s offered in 45 languages, spans over 170 countries and generates almost 100,000 responses in a six-month period. 

The CPE Relationship study measures the health of Microsoft’s relationship with its commercial customers and partners and acts as a powerful listening system to understand their needs, pain points and the drivers of satisfaction. Teams across the company, worldwide, use the metrics and insights from this research to develop targeted initiatives to improve the customer experience. 

To ensure we provide representative and stable scores from the CPE Relationship study, we require a minimum sample size of n=100 for any reported metric. While we easily reach minimum sample requirements for segments at the worldwide level (e.g., enterprise accounts), we often fall short of that threshold for segment and country parings (e.g., enterprise accounts in New Zealand). For any given wave, we were previously unable to report satisfaction scores for ~50% of segment and country pairings, leaving account leaders with little insight into the satisfaction of their customers and partners in those countries.

This sample-size threshold created a knowledge gap for some countries and posed a challenge for us – how do we provide customer satisfaction insights for segments with low response in certain countries? And more importantly, how do these country leaders improve the experience with Microsoft for their customers and partners? Are current strategies and programs working? We had qualitative data and verbatims for these smaller groups, but t...