IT Vendor Raves

CEO of ShoreTel joins the chorus

One of VendorRate's goals has been to allow companies that provide outstanding levels of customer satisfaction to stand way above the crowd of average and sub par vendors.   It’s a great to know we  help identify great vendors who really “get it” when it comes to customer satisfaction.

John W. Combs, CEO of ShoreTel, learned how well his company had scored on our LinuxWorld Report. Combs blogged how ShoreTel joins Amazon, Google, Apple, and VWware at the top of the LinuxWorld list in his recent ShoreTel blog http://blog.shoretel.com/2008/08/shoretel-lands-among-industry-leaders.html.    This is the first time the CEO of a publicly traded company has mentioned VendorRate results publicly, and we are both proud and excited.

As the volume builds across the numerous forms of media where VendorRate is being mentioned, we expect other CEO's of great organizations (of all sizes) to add their voice to the choir.   I hope every organization preparing to make an IT or telecom purchasing decision uses this brand new form of customer satisfaction "music". Only the best vendors want to sing out their great results :-)

Front page of Computerworld

Thanks to Todd Weiss of Computerworld. Todd asked a ton of questions, and he came back 5-6 different times for clarification. 

http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9112561&intsrc=hm_list

More ratings increase reliability

We had some truly remarkable ratings come in recently. 3 of them had almost perfect scores.

This reminded me of an important answer to a question I get almost every time I discuss VendorRate.  It usually takes the form of "what happens if a company gets a bad rating", but it also can be used for when a customer gets a great rating.  My answer is always the same.    One rating is a single data point. Its value comes when combined with other data points.  The more data points we have, the more reliable the information.  In other words,

"one grain of sand is not representative of the entire beach"    

in a later blog, I'll share research on representative sampling, e.g. what a few points of data can reliably tell us about the entire group.

In the mean time, please ask your vendor to have all their customers rate their performance.   The more grains of sand, the better the beach