Telemark Services released the 15th issue of the Voice of the Customer: IP Services for the Business User report today. Improvements required by customers are clear. The message hammered home, time and time again, by users is that carriers must meet requirements for value and after sales care without losing sight of the fact that service continuity is the Holy Grail. “Any decrease in price, for example, that compromised service continuity would be unacceptable, says Janet Watkin, Director at Telemark, yet by and large users expect much more for their money than what they receive at present. Efforts to link service continuity to price occur only in SLA’s (Service Level Agreements), adds Watkin, but these are punitive in nature. Users do not want refunds, they want very high levels of uptime. The seven global carriers covered in Telemark’s survey of multinational enterprises are AT&T, BT, BT Infonet, Cable & Wireless, Equant, NTT, and Verizon Business. They are measured by score card ratings across 32 service attributes which are ranked in order of customer priority.
According to Janet Watkin “the survey shows that Reliability, Availability and Security are the top customer priorities for an IPVPN. Poor quality in any of these areas would be a catalyst for change. However, such criteria are simply pre-requisites for purchase. Each network provider must offer these pre-requisites to exceptionally high standards. What matters thereafter is value and after sales care. This is where most of the carries fail to meet the expectation mark. Though various carrier improvement initiatives start and stop the massive leap forward still needed to close the expectation/performance gap remains elusive”.
Equant achieved the customer satisfaction pinnacle with the Best in Class for Overall Performance as indicated by the Telemark Platinum Score. This score denotes which carrier most closely meets customer requirements through the optimisation of effort on customer priorities, relative to rivals.
A Gold Award (for outstanding satisfaction) was presented to Eqaunt for the ‘feel good’ component of an Overall Satisfaction assessment. Nippon Telephone & Telegraph (NTT Com) received two Telemark Gold Awards, for outstanding results in Accurate Bills and No Hidden Extras in Bills. Other Golds went to BT/Infonet (Secure Data Transfer) and Equant (Network Reliability).
Additional details for each carrier and their performance on the 32 attributes are included in the full report. The report is published three times each year to benchmark the ability of global communications companies to provide exemplary bid-to-build customer satisfaction with IP products and services.
About Telemark’s Voice of the Customer: IP Services for the Business User Report
Telemark’s innovative report provides user feedback from several hundred data network managers worldwide on customer satisfaction with IP VPN and related International IP business services. The report is published three times each year (April, August, December) and includes profiles of service providers (AT&T, BT, Cable & Wireless, Equant, BT Infonet, NTT, and Verizon Business) based on customer information supplied during interviews to discern strengths and weaknesses. A comprehensive range of research techniques and robust methods are used to gather data thereby ensuring meaningful, actionable results. The report examines the levels of perceived importance and satisfaction on 32 service attributes from 'bid to bill'. The comparative assessment looks at perceived performances of the operators indicating 'Best in Class'. For more information about the report, visit http://telemarkservices.com/en/repsa.html.
About Telemark Services Ltd.
Telemark is a fast growing marketing services firm offering consultancy, publications and online analysis with proven expertise in measuring customer satisfaction, competitive analysis, benchmarking, trend analysis, channel management, new product development, demand estimates, branding, tariff analysis, and business strategy, exclusively within the telecommunications and IT sectors. An experienced team with decades of independent market research experience in the expanding market for voice, data and vision, Telemark is often the first-choice supplier for many organisations with a requirement for international market research and analysis covering emerging technologies such as VoIP, convergence and hosting applications. For more information, please visit www.telemarkservices.com or email info@telemarkservices.com.
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