VoIP Phones: Which Vendor Rates Best in Customer Satisfaction?VoIP Phones: Which Vendor Rates Best in Customer Satisfaction?
Mitel and Fanvil are in the Eastern Management Group Top 10 Leaders, with Unify and Polycom among the Best-Of-The-Best.
October 2, 2017
Delighting customers takes work. VoIP phone providers are not exempt. The product must deliver as promised. It requires a stellar warranty. And copious amounts of support must be in place. And certainly, if a business user would not recommend a purchased product to a friend, that's not good for the VoIP vendor's future sales... or the IT manager.
Several thousand customers recently evaluated their VoIP phone providers in an Eastern Management Group customer satisfaction survey. The global study included 17 of the most popular VoIP phone manufacturers and measured customer satisfaction with each one. You can find detailed information about the survey and the report,"2017 VoIP Phone Customer Satisfaction," on the Eastern Management Group website.
Customers judged VoIP phone vendors on 10 customer satisfaction measurements. We rolled these up into three subject areas, namely: Product, Vendor Experience, and Customer Delight.
Product measurements, of which there are three, relate to the device functionality and VoIP phone quality. The Vendor Experience category measures customer satisfaction at four way stations along the customer journey. Lastly, Customer Delight is a true judge of the customer's happiness, represented by three measurements, including the customer's willingness to recommend a VoIP phone vendor to a friend.
General Areas of Strength and Weakness
Weakness most often emerges with VoIP phone vendors' contact center experiences, which is one of the 10 customer satisfaction measurements in our study. As a counterpoint, installation, another measurement, can be a vendor showcase. The survey found that Mitel gets high marks for installation.
No VoIP phone vendor led all competitors in all 10 customer satisfaction measurements. VTech, in a remarkable achievement, is the only company for which 100% of survey respondents said they would recommend its VoIP phones to a friend.
That all VoIP phone providers take customer satisfaction seriously is a given. But making it to the Top 10 Leaders, in Eastern Management Group rankings, requires commitment and capital.
Let's use an L.L. Bean example of customer satisfaction. Should your L.L. Bean boots ever wear out, you simply mail them back for a new pair. For VoIP phones, the matter of support is paramount, like in the L.L. Bean model. And because hundreds of thousands of channel partners are engaged in everything from sales to support and add-on sales over time, that's expensive for VoIP phone providers. As someone who runs a research firm with communication industry clients, I recognize that just developing dealer training can be a million-dollar budget item. Adding good channel partners for VoIP phones is similarly costly for the provider. So when we say a VoIP phone provider is a Top 10 Leader, that's acknowledging a significant vendor commitment.
The benefits of VoIP phone customer satisfaction surveying accrue to both phone providers and customers. VoIP phone vendors get substantial customer satisfaction information on themselves and peer companies to use for benchmarking purposes. Users see customer evaluations of leading VoIP phone companies as a tool in the vendor selection process. With VoIP phone customer satisfaction information everyone wins.
Who made the Eastern Management Group's Top 10 Leaders in VoIP Phone Customer Satisfaction? Only companies that excel in the VoIP phone 10 customer satisfaction measurements make the list. According to the thousands of VoIP phone IT manager customers surveyed, Fanvil and Mitel join eight others in the Top 10 Leaders category.
An elite group of VoIP phone providers, the Best-Of-The-Best VoIP Phone Companies, are five showcase vendors in customer satisfaction. For 2017, Unify and Polycom joined Yealink, Digium and snom in the Eastern Management Group Best-Of-The-Best list.
For questions about our customer satisfaction study and report, please ask our researchers at the Eastern Management Group.
