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Decline In US Telecoms Online Experience - Report
The Customer Respect Group has released findings from its Fourth Quarter 2005 Online Customer Respect Study of Telecommunications firms. By interviewing a representative sample of the adult Internet population, and by analyzing and categorizing more than 2,000 corporate websites across a spectrum of industries, The Customer Respect Group has identified the attributes that together measure the online customer experience.
This report analyzed 44 cable, telecommunications and wireless/mobile firm websites to obtain a good sample of the sector.
Overall, the Telecommunications sector's CRI was 6.7 versus a rating of 6.9 for the last report in the second quarter. Thus, the industry lost its top industry spot to the Retail sector, which recently scored 7.0.
Just two firms in the Telecommunications industry achieved an Excellent CRI rating of 8.0 or more: Bell Canada and CenturyTel. Both companies have shown a consistent improvement over the last 3 reports. A further five achieved the Very Good standard, including Qwest, Sprint, Cablevision, Verizon Wireless and SBC. Qwest was extremely close to the Excellent rating, moving up to third position and one of just 3 companies that improved in every category since the last report.
Since the last report there was a drop in the aggregate scores for Privacy and Transparency. This aggregation represents, in the area of treatment of personal information, how open and clear policies are written and communicated together with the actual substance of those policies. The average rating for the combination was 7.0, down from 7.3 in the last report. The most positive trend is the continued decrease in the number of companies sharing information outside of their own organization (21 percent, down from 27 percent). On the negative side, researchers noted a lack of clarity about options available to opt-out of ongoing marketing activities. More than half of the firms evaluated could improve in this area.
The best performing companies in the combined Privacy/Transparency category were Verizon Wireless, Verizon and Bell Canada. All three companies had very impressive scores. Verizon scored a perfect 10 in Transparency while Verizon Wireless was the clear leader in Privacy (9.3).
In another key finding, the level of Responsiveness to customer online inquiries showed a mixed result. While the percentage of responses to emails continued to increase (up from 83% to 86%) there was a decrease in two other related areas: the number of responses that were helpful and relevant (down from 56% to 47%) and the number of responses delivered within a day.
In the Customer Respect Group Net Survey, 74% of web users felt a day was a valid period to wait for a response, but this expectation was met by just 43% of all emails sent by those in this study (down from 60%). This contrasts with the Retail sector, which recently responded to 65% of inquiries within a day.
As a measure of response quality, the percentage of firms that consistently responded with "helpful and relevant" responses within a day of being contacted dropped dramatically from 57% from the last report to just 27% this time.
Rank |
Company | CRI |
1 |
Bell Canada | 8.2 |
2 |
CenturyTel | 8.0 |
3 |
Qwest | 7.9 |
4 |
Sprint | 7.8 |
5 |
Cablevision | 7.7 |
6 |
Verizon Wireless | 7.6 |
7 |
SBC | 7.5 |
8 |
Shaw | 7.4 |
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Verizon | ||
10 |
BT | 7.3 |
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TELUS | ||
12 |
MCI | 7.2 |
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Vodafone | ||
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AT&T | ||
15 |
SaskTel | 7.1 |
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Rogers | ||
17 |
Fido | 7.0 |
18 |
Cox Communications | 6.9 |
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Skype | ||
20 |
O2 | 6.8 |
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Kingston Communications | ||
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Time Warner Cable | ||
23 |
Aliant | 6.7 |
24 |
T-Mobile | 6.6 |
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Cincinnati Bell | ||
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Comcast | ||
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T-Mobile (UK) | ||
28 |
Allstream | 6.5 |
29 |
BellSouth | 6.4 |
30 |
Cellular One | 6.3 |
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Telewest Broadband | ||
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Virgin Mobile | ||
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MTS | ||
34 |
Alltel | 6.2 |
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Primus Telecommunications Canada | ||
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Vonage | ||
37 |
Orange | 5.9 |
38 |
Cogeco Cable | 5.8 |
39 |
Cingular | 5.6 |
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Charter Communications | ||
41 |
IDT | 5.5 |
42 |
NTL | 5.3 |
43 |
TDS Telecom | 5.2 |
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Vid Posted to the site on 15th November 2005
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