The customer experience gap and how service providers fair

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What do businesses want from service providers?

It’s a question we’re continually trying to answer because we aim to not simply meet, but exceed our customer’s expectations. So, how do customer’s judge themselves and their businesses from a customer experience perspective, and does that match how they judge their service providers?

Earlier this year we carried out research with Global Research and Analyst Firm GigaOm, to find out what businesses expect from their service providers, whilst analysing whether there is a link between connectivity and customer experience.

We spoke to more than 350 IT business decision makers who made it clear that they preferred to focus on a longer-term assessment when measuring the success of their own service delivery. However, this differs from how they judge service providers, where first impressions are crucial.

When it came to assessing service providers, initial service delivery factors were the most significant measure of customer experience, ahead of other factors such as responsiveness over time. The time it takes from ordering to delivering a service was the most important factor followed by initial service performance and reliability when assessing the service provider. Yet when businesses measure their own customer experience performance they look to the longer term; whether SLAs have been met and whether overall responsiveness has improved.

So how can service providers provide a better experience?

The features customers want are the ones that make delivery ‘just work’. Automated provisioning with less human error, integration of internal platforms and self-service were top of the wish list and that’s great news for us.

Colt has a strong focus on customer experience as we work toward our vision of becoming the most customer oriented business in the industry. We’re investing in speeding up delivery, making the experience more personal and adding new platforms and ways for customers to interact with us in a way that suits them and their business. We know that service matters and it’s not enough to have the network, it’s the support and care that goes alongside it.

Take a look at our new infographic here, or download the full report.

Keri Gilder

06 November 2019

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