Copy of Copy of Research Projects for Vendors

 

Every time you buy something whether it’s a tomato or a car, you make a decision about the kind of business you want to support. Not all of our actions are that conscious, we don’t always think about the consequences of our buying decisions and what that means to how we will buy in the future.

With Roaming and Interconnect services, we buy from Vendors with a high degree of consciousness, we want to know so many things before we make that choice and rightly so, because the kind of decisions we make may cost us a high degree of time, money or effort to change. On the flip side, becoming a Vendor and entering into this great industry of ours, comes with a lot of challenges, MNOs have predisposed ideas about what to expect from Vendors and sadly it’s not all positive. What’s clear is like any relationship, Vendors and MNOs have to find the right compatibility.

In the last 3.5 years ROCCO research has been offering Vendor Performance Reports and in so doing supporting MNOs with these important buying decisions, one of the major requirements of MNOs taking part in our research has been to understand how Vendors perform in the area of customer service.

With most Vendors offering services internationally Customer Service creates quite a few specific challenges. We all know the cultural differences, languages and local business customs make a universal plan for Customer service delivery pretty impossible for Vendors. Adapting and being flexible in delivering the diverse needs of MNOS is after all an inevitably in International business.

This year we decided to broaden our research into some specific areas and we asked our research base of over 500 MNOs which areas were specifically appealing and while many KPIs for performance and leadership are fundamental to delivering services, customer service was the one which they told us about over and over.

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Taking all the Vendors in the marketplace which we have in previous Reports featured, we created 18 KPIS specific to Customer Service in three broad categories, Care, Capability and Quality and we asked MNOs to tell us more about the Vendors in these specific areas. MNOs were asked via social media, and our mailing list and given over 4 months to complete a confidential survey to allow us to gather their perceptions and experiences.

The KPIS featured some important criteria, which are important to the optimal delivery of services as well as Vendors ability to delight customers. As we all know, clients loyalty to vendors has two important effects on a Vendors business, it allows them to upsell to those clients and also win new clients via recommendations – which as we know, in this small Roaming and Interconnect industry we have, views about Vendors go viral without much effort when MNOs meet and attend conferences and groups talk about their experiences.

The Infographic below features the top Vendors according to MNOs during this years Customer Service research. This infographic is also available for download in PDF MNO’s Customer Service Champions 2016

MNO's Customer Service Champions 2016

About the leading Vendors

The Vendors featured are selling all kinds of diverse services (our Vendor Performance Reports explain the best Vendors for specific services) but we believe their abilities in Customer Service reflect their approach to the Vendor, client relationship overall. A relationship which can mean the catalyst to diversify with new products and services and build if you like multi-service hubs, hubs that in the long term allow for immense efficiencies for MNOs, if delivered well.

In this years research, PCCW Global, the international operating division of HKT, Hong Kong’s telecommunications service provider, has received the highest score this year within our Customer Service research. They are well regarded by MNOs consistently and the only Vendor in our report to score above 90% in several KPIs in our CARE category. MNOs said about their Customer Service it showed “Excellence”.

It is good to see that CLX and Nexmo who featured in Tier One of last years ROCCO A2P SMS Messaging Vendor Performance Report 2015 as leading Vendors (look out for the 2016 results next week) are also proving to excel in the area of Customer Service. Nexmo were found to offer “Great Service” while CLX’s customer service was rated “Outstanding”. Congratulations to both Vendors.These are Vendors well on their way to building on their great reputations by broadening their product portfolios.

ARCH (Advanced Roaming and Clearing House) is a Clearing Vendor which has featured in the last 3 years worth of ROCCOs Data Clearing and Financial Clearing reports very highly in the category of Customer Service, so it is no surprise to see them here.

Orange Wholesale is clearly a Vendor of some renown as well, what is interesting is that while some MNO Groups offer wholesale services to other MNOs, often they are not that focussed on delivering good service for MNOs outside of their own group and nor do they know how to be Vendors in the way that a non MNO Vendors do. As we saw from our IPX Vendor Performance Report 2015 (to be repeated in a few weeks) Orange is highly regarded by all kind of MNOs, congratulations to Orange for this success.

SIGOS is the worldwide supplier in automated end-to-end active testing of telecommunications networks, providers and services. They are a well liked and well respected Vendor and clearly delight MNOs with their approach to Customer Service. Sigos will feature in our Roaming Qos Vendor Performance and Market Intelligence Reports coming soon.

 

MNOs who took part in this research will shortly receive an exclusive Executive Summary Report of our findings featuring over 50 Vendors. An extract of this report will also be shared with any Vendor interested to see where they rank.

Regretfully while over 90 Vendors were featured in the report, not all Vendors are ranked in our rating table, this is either because there was no demand from MNOs to talk about them or the views were so minimal that we were not able to draw a significant view on how they perform. However what the research does do, as with all of our reports, is provided that we have at least 5 responses from MNOs about a Vendor, is allow for any Vendor large or small to appear in our reports. We want to encourage competition in the market and in so doing allow a good choice of Vendors to MNOs, so we actively encourage even the smallest Vendor to grow its business and compete.

Overall, Vendors should be recognised for a job well done, or incase they didn’t perform optimally, should have the ability to identify where they can improve. Even if they may not agree with the MNOs views here, they may have a second opinion into what’s important to MNOs.

A big thank you to the 158 MNOs who took part in this research.

Screen Shot 2016-06-16 at 10.14.14The full report is available to buy from our store. Please follow this link to find out more. 

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