VoIP – tried it and didn’t like it?

It’s a lot easier to find success stories than failure stories. First of all, vendors are always happy to talk about satisfied customers while trying, naturally, to sweep unhappy customers under the carpet. Secondly, we all prefer to talk about our successes rather than our failures.

The preliminary results from the just-completed dat- collection phase of the Webtorials 2004 VoIP State-of-the-Market survey indicate that most respondents are happy with their VoIP. In fact, a whopping 69% rated VoIP positively, 15% were neutral, and only 16% chose a negative response.

Nevertheless, being the curious sorts that we are, we decided it would be most interesting to find out a bit more about what went wrong for those who were dissatisfied. This could be useful both for finding out if these are problems that vendors might be able to address and for advising users on potential pitfalls. To that end, we’ve prepared a very short survey.

So far, it looks like the primary reasons people have been dissatisfied center around administrative, as opposed to technical, reasons. We’ve also not found any one supplier singled out. Rather, the companies with which people are dissatisfied seem to correlate rather well with market share. Of course, we don’t want to say too much about the preliminary survey results while we’re still gathering data.

We would really appreciate you filling out this survey if – and only if – you’re dissatisfied. If you are satisfied or neutral, please do not complete the survey. And once we get the results, we’ll let you know what we learned. Here’s the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=94613593787