Few U.S. Business ISP Customers Would Recommend That Others Buy Their Chosen Services

source: PC Magazine

“Value” is what buyers say it is, despite all efforts by suppliers to define and shape perceptions of product value. So customer surveys often are important measures of value perceptions. One recent survey of business customers of Internet service providers found RCN and Verizon FiOS at the top of the rankings, Charter Communications ranked above average but all other surveyed major providers below average among business customers.

For those who rely on “net promoter scores” (a measure of customer loyalty based on the answer to a single question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?”), the results are consistent with overall rankings.

RCN and Verizon are at the top; Charter and Cox Communications are in positive territory, but all others have negative net promoter scores.

The “likelihood to recommend” scores for U-Verse, TWC, Comcast, and CenturyLink are all so low that the resulting Net Promoter Scores are all negative numbers.

Broadly, those rankings are consistent with polls of consumer satisfaction with U.S. Internet service providers. According to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, Verizon is significantly ahead of other providers.

So far, no major entity seems to track Google Fiber performance as a routine part of such indices, so it impossible to say how consumers rank Google Fiber.

But the ISP industry is the lowest-ranked industry studied as part of the ACSI program. Linear TV fares only slightly better than the ISP industry.