As discussed in my two previous posts here and here, more than 3,000 IT managers evaluated their PBX providers for the Eastern Management Group’s 2018 customer satisfaction study. Out of 10 Customer Satisfaction Measurements researched, I’m going to focus here only on one vendor -- Cisco -- and just one measurement -- Overall Satisfaction – for mid-market and large enterprises.
This follows on a look at Overall Satisfaction across all customer segments -- SMB and enterprise -- and all world regions, as well as a general discussion of customer satisfaction ratings in the mid-market and large enterprise. As the reader might recall from the first post, IT managers chose Vertical Communications, RingCentral, and Xorcom as best in Overall Satisfaction, one of the numerous research categories. And, as noted in the second post, Mitel scores well in the mid-market and enterprise. It swept first place in quite a few Customer Satisfaction Measurement categories evaluated by large businesses.
Besides Mitel, Cisco and NEC are other mid-market and enterprise leaders taking top spots in Customer Satisfaction Measurements. These three companies, along with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, Avaya, and Unify, are the six companies most frequently reviewed by large customer IT managers when choosing a new PBX.
As for the Cisco achievement, Overall Satisfaction is a capstone evaluation. To IT managers, it is a comprehensive assessment of how their PBX providers have performed in three provider categories:
Cisco is number one in 2018 Enterprise Overall Satisfaction, which is the holistic vendor experience.
Obviously to be the Overall Satisfaction leader you first need a good product. That’s equipment, software, and service contracts, all areas in which Cisco does well according to the company’s customers in our survey. Second, the Overall Satisfaction leader must provide exceptional customer support. Support is the cradle-to-grave relationship where providers must perform handstands each day, and again Cisco customers applaud these capabilities.
How complicated can it be to provide life cycle support? Every customer would like its provider to be the single point of contact for all matters. But enterprises routinely have worldwide operations; customers’ operations are scattered here and there. IT managers expect spare parts to be kept locally. Trucks and certified technicians have to be positioned within one-hour drive time of the customer. As a result, global support -- even from Cisco -- must be available from channel partners. Enterprise customers seem to endorse Cisco’s worldwide distribution of channel partner responsibilities.
Eastern Management Group’s research has found Cisco having the world’s most formidable channel partner program. The company has some of the largest and best-trained dealers in the world. Collectively its presence is ubiquitous. Some examples of Cisco dealers are AT&T, Bell Canada, BT, Computacenter, Dimension Data, ECCOM, Embratel, IBM, Logicalis, Presidio, Romtelecom, Tech Data, Verizon, West, and WWT. These are just a few of Cisco’s thousands of worldwide partners.
Cisco prepares its partners well to serve the enterprise customer. Eastern Management Group has evaluated many partner programs, and in our opinion, Cisco offers one of the best.
Not surprisingly Cisco spends oodles of dollars on partner training. How much? Eastern Management Group research shows that it can cost millions of dollars to develop one good partner training program -- say for a product such as a virtualized server, or a vertical market such as healthcare sales and support. Cisco operates in rarefied air being able to spend like this. It does so that partners aren’t only certified but are experts. And our interviews with Cisco partners shows support from the mothership is at the ready. For enterprise PBX and cloud sales, the partner can sell and fulfill (implement). If necessary, Cisco will sell, and the partner can take over. Whatever it takes wherever it is, Cisco works to be the leader in enterprise overall satisfaction.
In a future post, we’ll report on NEC, another mid-market and enterprise PBX customer satisfaction winner. Mid-market and enterprise customers in Eastern Management Group’s 2018 customer satisfaction study say NEC is the winner in our Customer Satisfaction Measurement for Reliability. Reliability is a critical measure, especially for government and healthcare PBXs, two of NEC’s most significant target vertical markets.
We cover all 16 of the significant PBX providers, 10 Customer Satisfaction Measurement classifications, and vendor scores in our “2018 Premises and Hosted PBX Customer Satisfaction” report. You can get more information about the report from Eastern Management Group or by contacting [email protected] directly.
