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Vendor service needs to improve
Firms quizzed by Cogeco Peer 1 have expressed frustration with the level of service currently being offered by vendors
Vendors have plenty of room for improvement and more needs to be done on the customer service front if they are to win over greater numbers of IT pros.
There are not too many firms totally satisfied with the levels of service being offered by current vendors with 85% telling managed cloud and hosting player Cogeco Peer 1 in a survey that they felt there was room for improvement.
Service was ranked close to the top of the criteria for choosing which vendor to work with, along with cost.
When it comes to price the emphasis is not on looking for the cheapest but the vendor that understands the challenges being faced by users and has responded with more flexible approaches.
Susan Bowen, vp and general manager EMEA at Cogeco Peer 1, pointed to the 22% of businesses that put service at the top of their lists as evidence that it really mattered to users.
“Good customer service has often been overlooked in favour of competitive pricing and exciting new products in the IT market, but more and more businesses are finding the service they receive isn’t living up to their expectations or needs, as they grow," she said.
“Having dedicated technical account managers, fast-turnaround on enquiries and 24/7 support can make more of a difference to their bottom line than the expertise the vendor brings or product flexibility, in a service outage or data breach situation, for instance," she added.
The research found that the need for improved service was not limited to just one or two verticals and was a request spread across a wide customer base.
The timing of the Cogeco Peer 1 research is against a background of more talk about services, with today being MSP Day, and a growing acceptance that flexibility and simplicity are some of the main areas that vendors are working on.
