Jul 14, 2006 2:20 PM,

Study: Carriers respect online customers

By Dan O'Shea

The Customer Respect Group, an international research and consulting firm that focuses on how corporations treat their online customers, said its most recent study found that telecom service providers ranked above average compared to a range of other industries, and that traditional telcos and mobile carriers in particular scored higher than cable TV companies and mobile virtual network operators.

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Those findings, which will be officially released on Monday, might boost the confidence of telcos that felt bruised by the recent J.D Power and Associates survey that had cable TV companies ranked ahead of telcos for customer satisfaction in most of the traditional Bell company regions. However, it also should be noted that the CRG lists several major telcos, including AT&T, BellSouth, Verizon Communications and Qwest, as clients.

Having stated that, the agency's Third Quarter 2006 Online Customer Respect Study of International Telecommunications Companies, analyzed 55 companies in the telecommunications industry and assigned each of them a Customer Respect Index rating, described in a CRG statement as "a qualitative and quantitative in-depth analysis and independent measure of a customer's experience when interacting via the Internet." Some CRI factors include site usability, communication and trust for how personal data is handled.

The telecom industry scored an average CRI rating of 5.9 overall, above average compared to other industries and marginally better than the last report six months ago, the CRG stated. The industry showed improvement in the communication category, with a 5.9 rating that was 30% better than in the last report and well above the 4.9 average for other industries.

The CRG report noted that 13% percent of email questions are still ignored completely and 41% percent required more than one day for a response. MVNOs performed poorly in this category, with 25% of all e-mail questions being ignored. Other wireless firms responded to 67% of e-mails within one day.