An overview of how we gather and use your feedback

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Greetings, everybody! The Microsoft Press team is currently reviewing all the feedback you’ve sent us in the first quarter of the year (January through March) via the following mechanisms:

We gather the data into four reports: Developer, Information Worker, IT Professional (without Training Kits), and Training Kits. All of us—from Production Engineer to Publisher—read the reports, and we also assign rotating primary reviewers to summarize the trends in your feedback and to suggest changes we can make to address your feedback. (For example, last time we decided that the URL pointing to an Information Worker book’s practice files should appear in each chapter rather than only in the book’s “Using the Practice Files” section at the beginning of the book.) Next week all of us meet to discuss your recent feedback and to make a list of improvements to pursue.

Of the mechanisms I mentioned above, the survey is particularly helpful. Its questions allow us to understand your hopes for a book and to gauge your happiness with specific aspects of it:

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More important, the survey gives you lots of opportunity via various questions to speak your mind in a freeform way:

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These sections of the survey are very important to us. In fact, in addition to doing our own review, we share these reports with authors so that they can monitor their book’s effectiveness and, if appropriate, plan for a smart revision down the line.

Please note that our survey does not ask for any personal information. In fact, if you enter contact information, we delete that information before distributing the report. We want you to be comfortable expressing your thoughts in the survey. Note also that this means we are unable to respond to you if you request information via the survey. If you need a response regarding one of our titles, the best thing to do is to write mspinput [at] microsoft.com.

By the way, our customer satisfaction review tool—we call it the NSAT+ Browser—currently tracks your feedback regarding over 550 Microsoft Press titles:

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Every quarter we add your feedback to the tool and we try to figure out how we can do better. The primary source of feedback is the survey, so let me close by sharing that link with you again:

https://www.microsoft.com/learning/booksurvey

Thanks for your feedback, and please tell us more!