Business Highly Consider Reliability When Selecting a Telecom Provider

By Casey Houser
Contributing Writer

The network performance of major telecommunications providers is fairly consistent across the board. They all provide significant uptimes and reliability, but a recent report shows that businesses are still willing to switch providers to achieve small incremental gains in the overall performance of their networks in addition to being picky about price and new features.

J.D. Power released its "2014 U.S. Business Wireline Satisfaction Study" this past week. It showed that based on the responses of 4,220 customers of data and voice services at very small, small/medium, and large enterprises overall satisfaction was swayed most by performance and reliability. More than a quarter of respondents—27 percent—indicated that overall satisfaction hinged on performance. That is compared with sales at 19 percent, cost of service at 18 percent, and communications, billing, and customer service at 15 percent, 14 percent, and 12 percent respectively.

Kirk Parsons (News - Alert), senior director of telecommunications services at J.D. Power, explained the situation regarding satisfaction and its relationship with network performance.

"As annual improvements in network performance continue, such performance-related issues as network outages and reliability continue to be key elements of dissatisfaction for business and a reason to consider switching providers," Parsons said. "It's imperative for telecom providers to communicate the improvements the industry has made relative to network performance and to provide quick resolution when issues do occur, as even minor outages can hamper business capabilities to service customers."

Perhaps the most important line in Parsons' statement is the last. It is more important than ever for businesses to be able to operate consistently. Many would certainly choose 100 percent uptimes if they could get it, and they would suffer through the financial costs to get there. As companies run their operations globally, they offer services around the clock, and therefore they continue to work around the clock. When their operations are directly tied to digital networks that provide internal communications for employees and external communications with customers, a few seconds of downtime can seem like an eternity.

The J.D. Power research also showed that short outages (five minutes or less) have dropped in the past three years by 28 percent, from 4.7 incidents in 2011 to 3.4 incidents in 2014, and that long outages (more than five minutes) have dropped 16 percent from 1.9 incidents to 1.6 incidents during the same period.

Those drops, however, have not swayed businesses from switching providers. The survey indicated that 28 percent of respondents have switched providers based on the reliability of their service. Other reasons businesses have switched include better pricing, new features, or favorable pricing at 73 percent, 30 percent, and 29 percent of respondents selecting those reasons for their moves, respectively.

Finally, respondents said the top reason their businesses chose their current providers were price, with 17 percent selecting that option, and network reliability and speed, with 13 percent selecting that option.

Edited by Maurice Nagle