More than 3,000 customers evaluated their session border controller (SBC) providers in a new survey of 14 vendors conducted by Eastern Management Group, judging them on 10 customer satisfaction measurements. Ingate Systems and Metaswitch receive two of the 2018 customer satisfaction awards, the former for Contact Center Experience and the latter for Recommend-To-A-Friend.
The SBC market is a high-growth sector. SBC purchases are growing twice as fast as overall IT spending, worldwide. Seventeen percent of businesses use SBCs today with some of the largest customers being telecom carriers and small businesses, particularly those with 11 to 50 employees, according to the Eastern Management Group latest market study, "
2018-2024 SIP Global Market 7-Year Forecast and Analysis."
- Ingate Systems -- When it comes to contact center experience, no other vendor in our study ranks close to Ingate’s favorability rating. The company makes enterprise SBCs for SIP connectivity, security, and interoperability, such as connecting PBXs and UC solutions to SIP trunking service providers. Ingate has more than 10,000 products installed worldwide.
- Metaswitch -- Metaswitch has a remarkably high Net Promoter Score (NPS) and a commanding Recommend-To-A-Friend customer rating, which puts the company in the category’s first place. Metaswitch has 1,000 service provider customers, as well as enterprises that use the company’s Perimeta cloud-native carrier-class virtualized SBC. Perimeta is the keystone of IP-based network access and interconnection, providing network access control, security and service/protocol interworking, supporting millions of users worldwide. In its SIP market study, Eastern Management Group describes Metaswitch as “the go-to company for high-performance SBC software for the communications industry.”
Why Care About SBC Contact Centers?
The SBC provider’s contact center is the most frequently exercised touch point with the enterprise IT manager, and the customer’s employees.
Tier 1 contact center support gets numerous customer calls and generally requires a lot of qualified personnel to handle the load. When vendors blow it, look here. Tier 2 and 3 support is where delays creep in; now the issue becomes one of availability of skilled resources.
Contact center performance is a sustained litmus test for evaluating the provider’s customer service delivery. Good experiences are fundamental to an enduring customer-provider relationship. Bad experiences call in a lot of chits that a provider may not have yet earned.
Of our 10 customer satisfaction measurements, the two most difficult for vendors to master are Contact Center Experience and Recommend-To-A-Friend. Much too often vendors receive poor Contact Center Experience grades in our customer satisfaction surveys, with the consequences also reflected in the Recommend-To-A-Friend scores.
The provider’s track record is essential when choosing a vendor; but if there is good contact center experience reported by other customers, and strong recommendations to a friend, there’s a foundation on which to make the purchase decision.
For more information about the Eastern Management Group reports “2018 Session Border Controller Customer Satisfaction” and "2018-2024 SIP Global Market 7-Year Forecast and Analysis," please
ask our researchers or contact John Malone directly at
[email protected].
