Dassault SolidWorks World opened this Monday to an excited, energetic crowd that numbered almost 4000, about 1000 more than SolidWorks expected due to the current economic climate. As much doom and gloom as we hear lately it was very exciting to see the level of engagement of the SolidWorks customers! DS SolidWorks CEO Jeff Ray, opened the conference by first setting the Twitter hashtag as #sww09, then putting the economic conditions and hardships out in the open and told some stories about how several loyal customers had paid their own way and even taken vacation to get to the conference in the wake of budget reductions. He then sent time with a recap of its success on moving three key elements on the products and for the customers: 1. customer service, 2. product performance, 3. user experience.
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CEO Jeff Ray
Grading company performance on each element, which by the way, I think is a strong move for transparency and continues to increase customer loyalty, Jeff gave the company:
B- customer service (an area he stated was a very high focus over the last year)
C+ product performance
B+ user experience
The highlight of the opening session though was the "interview" session that Jeff conducted on stage with Sir Richard Branson.
CEO Jeff Ray interviewing Sir Richard Branson
The two executives discussed Sir Branson's business successes and failures, his world records and took questions from SolidWorks community bloggers. Following the main stage event Sir Branson held a press conference and continued to answer questions.
During the questions Sir Branson raised one of his key concerns, that not enough women are going into engineering / product design fields and that was, in his opinion a hinderance to innovation. Sir Branson was engaging, humorous, and at the same time very insightful on the process of innovation.
One of the most interesting bits of information that was first shared on the main stage by CEO Jeff Ray is SolidWorks use of social media to capture and prioritize customer needs by using crowdsourcing and wisdom of crowds approaches. In a follow on interview I discussed this process with DS SolidWorks VP of strategy Suchit Jain. The executive team has made a solid commitment to involving users in the product enhancement and development process. Suchit put a process in place that captures customer input in three ways, 1. "voice of the customers" that captures enhancements in a web based system that allows customers to vote on the proposed enhancements, 2. Lead users, which is a small council of innovative customers that provide input and guidance and 3. a program called "Observations" which pairs each SolidWorks executive with a consultant and requires each pair to conduct 2 observation session per year, which entails sitting with end users for several hours and observing their work flow. This three pronged approach balances the type of feedback and distributes across the three channels to give insight both at the tactical product level and also helps craft a longer term strategy.
