NetworkComputing.com has released the feature story from their 2007 NWC Reader Survey. The feedback they received was significant.
“IT managers are deeply dissatisfied with the way the vendor community does business. That's the bottom line of our 2007 Reader Survey, in which the response data and true-life anecdotes chart just how and where IT vendors are failing their customers.Vendors are overpromising and underdelivering on features and capabilities and failing to support their customers. IT pros know how to take vendor promises with a grain of salt, but when 72 percent of respondents say products aren't shipped with promised features, we've got a problem. And customer support is only mildly better. Many survey participants said first-line customer support is inadequate and vendors aren't willing to take responsibility for technical problems.” [Emphasis added]
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Everyone knows vendors routinely overstate the capabilities of products and services, but the extent of this practice is disturbingly widespread. Only 28 percent of respondents said key features promised by a salesperson were actually present in a major product rollout.
This practice may win accounts, but it sure doesn't lead to satisfied customers. When asked, "If you could stop vendors from doing one thing ..." the top answer was "promising capabilities that aren't there." A comment from a disgruntled reader sums it up best: "Vendors need to reality-check their salesweasels."
NetQoS's founders came from the IT world. They ran IT organizations, purchased from IT vendors, and lived this experience. In fact, they developed the first generation of NetQoS products in the IT department of a global company. Undoubtedly, the same frustration expressed in this survey led to the development of one of NetQoS' core founding principles – We under promise, and over deliver.
It is literally plastered on our walls and in our psyche. Well... not literally literally in our psyche, but certainly literally literally on our walls...
...and it's more of a paint with wood accents than plaster - you get the idea.
Wall-mounted embossed typography notwithstanding, NetQoS has received some very high marks in customer satisfaction, because each and every employee here adheres to this principle. We'd better, we're evaluated based on it and 7 other principles.
In August of 2005, First Market Research did a survey of our customers, and found that they had a 88% "very favorable" rating of us and a 12% "fairly favorable" rating, and more than 90% said that NetQoS's products were having a beneficial impact on their organization. The numbers speak for themselves.
Yes, we are fully aware of how marketing-cheesy and self-congratulatory that last sentence sounds. But on the other hand, what’s our alternative to high customer satisfaction? Low customer satisfaction? Ticked off in-house engineers working to fill the gap between what we can offer and what we promise? That’s not a good business plan – we want to sell people our product but at the end, a soured deal can result in a bad reputation, a bad reputation means fewer people will buy our services. Or, as a NWC survey responder put it:
“’Some vendors provide excellent service, all the time. Other vendors make false claims and provide lousy after-sale support,’ a survey respondent said. ‘I believe it's my job, as an IT director, to make sure we select vendors that fall into the first group.’”
by Jin Kim