IT Vendor Raves

Are you a high maintenance customer?

I'll paraphrase the head of customer satisfaction of a publicly traded company here in Silicon Valley.

"Despite the numerous statements IT companies make about providing great customer satisfaction, vendors really want customer apathy. Most companies hope a customer buys their products and then goes away."

I've heard the tag "high maintenance given to many customers over the years. In most instances, it is the vendor who is high maintenance. 

 Think about it. How many times have you heard a business say any of the following?

“We want our order shipped to us wrong.

 “We really don’t care when we get it.  Nobody on our team is scheduling their time for implementation or installation.

“Sure, emailing us with a response 4 days from now will be fine.  I don’t need the answer anytime soon.”

 “Please take our system down during peak hours.

“It’s ok if the price changes. Budgets are just guidelines around here.

“Send your junior field service folks to help us. We want to learn as they do.”  

The truth is that customers want to fix their business issues, not create more problems. Customers usually become “high maintenance” when their order is late, when the product is hard to install or use, when training is incomplete, or when the sales rep over promises and under delivers.  

The great vendors know the best customer relationships begin when the customer asks their first question  AFTER an order is placed.   That's not high maintenance, it's good business. 

Oracle OpenWorld 2008

The Oracle community has been fantastic, and they have been sharing ratings in volumes.  We often have a wait at our 6 rating stations, and the users are promising to bring VendorRate back to their organizations.   We are quite grateful for the wonderful response, and our "Best Vendors" report from the Oracle community will definitely be our best ever.  Look for the report to be released towards the end of next week.

Also, please visit booth 2042 in Moscone South.   Another iPod Touch will be given away.

Oracle OpenWorld 2008

The Oracle community has been fantastic, and they have been sharing ratings in volumnes.  We often have a wait at our 6 rating stations, and the users are promising to bring VendorRate back to their organizations.   We are quite grateful for the wonderful response, and our "Best Vendors" report from the Oracle community will definitely be our best ever.  Look for the report to be released towards the end of next week.

Also, please visit booth 2042 in Moscone South.   Another iPod Touch will be given away.

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