IT Vendor Raves

Apple iPod Touch - Win one!

The new iPod Touch is simply beautiful.   I just received three of the 32gb models today for promotions we are running in September.    One drawing is from our existing membersship who rate or refer a colleague during September.   Another drawing is for new members who rate vendors this month, and the final drawing will be a trade show giveaway.

Apple really has their act together on this new product release. I ordered these immediately after product announcement last week, and they were on my doorstep 3 days later.  I'll forgive them for not doing the engraving, I think there was "pilot error" when I did the ordering.

Our iPod  Touch drawings are in addition to the $5 Starbucks Card we give out each time an IT or business professional enters a rating.  The iPod Touch promotion has had such a great response, we'll probably do it again in October. 

  This new 32gb Touch is so pretty and sleek,  it makes me want to enter a rating!  Alas, I'm ineligble :-)

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 :-)

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

Welcoming International Sybase User Group (ISUG)

Thanks to Mike Harrold and the International Sybase User Group for helping build the VendorRate database the past two weeks.  We look forward to a strong partnership together in the coming years. The Sybase users did a wonderful job. They rated Sybase more than 120 times, and they provided great feedback on many other IT vendors including Cisco, Oracle. iAnywhere, Sun, and...of course... Microsoft.  ( Although the actual data suggests otherwise, sometimes it seems as if everyone wants to offer up a Microsoft rating or Microsoft review )

We are going to begin focusing our rating campaigns on the lesser known brand name vendors. Some of these niche market vendors have outstanding levels of customer satisfaction without getting any limelight outside their industry.   We'll also be emphasizing ratings on mid tier service providers who are provide the "final mile" of delivery for many of the large brands.

We'll keep the coffee flowing. We have plenty of $5 Starbucks Cards to give as thanks when you give a business tech rating. 

Top 8 Technology Vendors for Q2 2008

VendorRate has released our inaugural quarterly results summary, The VendorRate Report for Q2 2008.

http://www.vendorrate.com/news/2008-07-14-VRReport.pdf

The VendorRate Report is designed to highlight vendors with the highest customer satisfaction scores, top vendors by industry, and identify customer satisfaction by industry sectors.   The report will only get bigger and better as VendorRate grows, and we hope this report eventually becomes the technology "Bible" regarding customer satisfaction.   After all, I've been told that the first FedEx package sort was done on a card table :-)

Some of the vendors receiving exceptional scores included ChemSW, CDW,  Seagate, HP (servers) VMware, Microsoft (server/infrastructure), Dell (server), and Apple

Some of the vendors receiving poor aggregate scores included Fry's Electronics, Sprint/Nextel, EMC, Qwest Communications, Symantec (enterprise backup and storage),  and Microsoft (operating systems)

You can see top vendors for each of these hardware industries:

Computer Peripherals; Mass Storage Systems; Personal Computers; Servers and

Workstations & Thin Clients

You can see top vendors for each of these software industries:

Chemical Industry Software; Collaborative Software; Content & Document Management Software; Database & File Management Software; Development Tools; Operating Systems; Utilities Software; Scientific & CAD/CAM Software; Enterprise Application Integration Software; Financial Services, Legal; & Government Software; Manufacturing, Warehousing & Industrial Software; Security Software; Storage & Systems Management Software; Virtualization

You may sign up to receive future quarterly reports at   http://tinyurl.com/5qe5k4

Worst of TechEd 2008- IT Vendor Rankings

I've debated about how much I want to throw stones on this blog.   My primary intent is to focus on top performing vendors. After all, the title is Vendor Raves, not vendor rants :-)   However, all our data is transparent, and the scoring information shines light on both the excellent vendor and those who need to improve. 

There were two frequently ranked vendors at TechEd who had "Poor" overall customer satisfaction scores as rated by their current customers.   I've listed them below. Not coincidentally, they received all  "worst in category" totals, tying with 5 each.

Symantec Enterprise Storage/Backup		48.6
EMC Corporation		51.2

Top IT Vendors- TechEd 2008 results

Just a quick summary of the top customer satisfaction scores for ITvendors as rated by TechEd attendees. The list was derived from frequently rated vendors, and it only shows vendors with "Excellent" overall scores. I'll release a list of poor performing vendors a bit later.   Isn't it nice how numerical scoring make comparing vendors easier?!

            Vendors with "Excellent"  summary scores

     Company                                                                            Score

Hewlett-Packard  Desktop/Notebook	87.3
Dell Storage-Networking	84.5
VMware	83.8
CDW	83.4
Dell Server	83.2
Microsoft Server/Infrastructure	81.5
Network Appliance	81.5

	Best in Category
Category			Company	Score
Recommend			VMware	8.9
Integrity	(tie)		VMware	8.5
			HP Desktop/Notebook	8.5
Communication			CDW	8.4
Timeliness			HP Desktop/Notebook	9.5
Usability	(tie)		HP Desktop/Notebook	8.8
			Dell Storage/Networking	8.8
Reliability			Dell Storage/Networking	9.0
Budget			HP Desktop/Notebook	9.3
Customer Service			Dell Server	8.3
Expertise			VMware	8.8
Effectiveness			VMware	9.0

Top 5 things I learned exhibiting at TechEd 2008

I just returned from 4 days at the Microsoft TechEd conference in Orlando.  Here are some observations

1) Customers continue to compliment as well as complain about their vendors.

     The raters at TechEd were thoughtful and diligent. They really wanted to share both their good and bad vendor experiences with others.

2)      Good vendors don't ignore their bad scores. A few well known vendors took some big rating “lumps” during the show. Their management dropped in to learn about the VendorRate system. They really wanted to know areas to improve. This echoes a conversation I had with a senor sales exec at a Fortune 100 company a few weeks ago. When I asked his biggest challenge, he answered “My #1 problem is in understanding what the customers are really thinking about us.”

3)      Ease promotes use. 

       We had several “serial” raters who evaluated 3-5 vendors each of the four days. They commented how the standardized rating form made rating vendors easier each time they used the form, and how it made them think more deeply about some of our rating criteria.The more frequently someone rates, the easier it is to rate the next vendor.

4)       Rating comments are a source of buried treasure.

     If a rater takes a few extra moments to enter comments, the rating's value increases exponentially.  We think this is so important, that we are changing the comment field titled "Product or Brands Used" to be a required field.  We will also be moving all comment boxes below the rating grid to prompt users to enter comments more frequently.

5)      The attendees at TechEd were the absolute sweet spot for gathering rating information on vendors.

The attendees seemed particularly motivated to rate vendors compared to other shows. In our first 100 days of being live, this was the best group by far and away. These are the workers who came to learn hands-on at the labs. They are also the implementers, those who get things done and keep the systems running smoothly for their organization.  I thought this group was generally more committed to remain actively involved for the duration of the event. 

6)      (BONUS) The bottom of a mouse pad can be used as a great jar opener!

Yes, it’s true. The rubberized bottom of a mouse pad is perfect for opening tight jar lids. Try it!    Then ask me to send you a VendorRate dual function mouse pad and jar opener J

A big thank you to everone at TechEd. We'll be back. 

And to anyone wondering which vendors got the best scores, I'll be posting TechEd results later this weekend

Microsoft TechEd 2008 - The Frenzy

It's the morning after Microsoft's Partner Expo evening reception.  It was extremely busy all night, and we were near seating capacity in our little 10x10 rating booth for much of the time.  It was very helpful for me to look over the shoulders of first time raters, and I observed a few spots on the rating form where people repeatedly paused to ask questions.   

Users usually don’t tell you where they get stuck, and on the web, they’ll often just move on to another page or leave the website altogether. Last night was a great education for me, and we'll be making minor tweaks to the website in the coming weeks to help speed users through the rating process.   I may also embed 10-20 second video commentaries that quickly answer frequently asked questions.

And “the frenzy” doesn’t just describe the schwag-hungry crowd last night. It also refers to

1) The ongoing battle all exhibitors experienced trying to keep our internet connections live as Microsoft and the Convention Center internet provider crashed each other’s systems. 

2) Driving to the convention through the worst thunderstorms I’ve seen in 10 years, resulting tornado warnings a mere 30 miles away

Vendor Raves- Making life easy on the IT customer

Hello to the renamed VendorRaves blog.   

The Institute of Supply Management for Silicon Valley has asked us to share new vendor selection tools such as VendorRate at an upcoming lunch meeting. Their email announcement went out with an obvious typo in the first sentence. Now, here's the rub... it's my typo. ISMSV asked me to help them create the promotional email, and they thought well enough of our content to copy and paste it into their email blast as written.

This got me thinking. It was obvious that the group was time constrained, and they were only able to launch the email quickly because we had done the work for them.  And then I remembered the numerous times my companies have received "Top Vendor" honors because we did as much work as possible for the user.   

It's more than just customer service, it's more than good communication, and it's more than just quality. Vendors get rave reviews when they make functionality EASY. IT Vendors get top ratings when a vendor understands what the business customer really wants to accomplish and then does most of the heavy lifting. 

And guess what?  Customers are willing to overlook a small flaw, the tiny imperfection, or a minor typo when companies meet their major needs. In fact, they don't even see them!