This is the third in a series of posts that discusses how a global sample of more than 325 systems integrators who participated in the 2009 Big Broadcast Survey ranked broadcast technology vendors in a variety of measures.
In an era when many broadcasters are shedding technology positions, systems integrators have become an extremely important part of the technology value chain. Broadcasters now routinely outsource their project work to systems integrators, who are called in for their expertise and experience. Thus, the relationship that vendors have with their systems integrators partners is very important to their business.
Previously I have looked at how systems integrators rank broadcast technology vendors for innovation and how systems integrators rank broadcast vendors for quality. This post looks at how the global sample of systems integrators ranked vendors for “great customer service.”
This is fourth time I have written about how broadcast technology vendors are perceived by the market for their customer service. Previous posts on the subject include “A Ranking of Broadcast Technology Vendors for “Great Customer Service,” which breaks out overall rankings by geography, and “How broadcasters of different sizes rank technology vendors for great customer service.”
I have also touched on how the perception of customer service can be extremely varied in different regions. I highlighted one such case in an article called “Brand Schizophrenia? Regional/customer variations in perception of broadcast vendor brands.”
Customer service is a very important measure, and in many cases, it is one of the key determining factors in purchase decisions. I would imagine that this is particularly true for systems integrators who must work simultaneously with many vendors while striving to complete a project on time and on budget.
Yet, from my research, I’ve found that the customer service offerings of broadcast technology vendors is also something that is perceived by the market as not being as strong as other metrics such as innovation, reliability and quality. Indeed, as I wrote in a previous post, “respondents were harder on [customer service] than any other … It’s worth noting that on an overall basis, respondents to the BBS were much stingier with their ‘grades’ in this category compared to all the others. Many companies received very high scores for metrics like ‘overall opinion,’ ‘innovation,’ ‘reliability,’ etc., but no company was ranked ‘off the charts’ in terms of the perception of ‘great customer service.’”
Having said that, how did systems integrators rank broadcast technology vendors for “great customer service?”
The accompanying chart shows the responses from more than 325 systems integrators. It is broken out by geography to show the responses of the global sample of all systems integrators who participated in the study as well as the responses of systems integrators in EMEA and the Americas. Due to a small sample size, systems integrator rankings for Asia-Pacific have not been included as a separate column. For the sake of comparison, I have also included in this chart the rankings of all respondents (regardless for organization type, geography, etc.) and all broadcasters (regardless of size or geography) in the first and second columns, respectively.
Please note that in all cases, these brands are shown in alphabetical order, NOT in the order of their ranking in the study
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