Overall VoIP satisfaction is high

This time we want to get into more details of the results from the Webtorials 2004 VoIP State-of-the-Market survey. A complete summary of the report, which is sponsored in part by Nortel, will be available in September. But there are some early results that we can share now.

In the last newsletter, we mentioned that a sizable percentage (16%) of the respondents indicated they were not satisfied with their implementation. And while we are continuing to track the specifics of why these people were not happy, we also want to point out that 69% had a positive experience with VoIP.

One of the most interesting aspects of this satisfaction score is how closely it mirrors the satisfaction ratings from last year’s survey. In the survey for both years, the respondents were asked to rank their satisfaction with their VoIP implementation on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 indicating “not satisfied” and 7 indicating “highly satisfied.” Thus, a value of 4 would be considered neutral. A year ago, the average satisfaction was 5.03.

The early responses indicated a significant drop in satisfaction, so we ended up watching this indicator quite closely. This early response also prompted us to prepare the “VoIP Less-than-Satisfaction Survey” that we discussed last time. However, as more results came in, the final number satisfaction rating turned out to be 5.03 – again! In fact, as the second half of the responses came in, this number never strayed from this value by more than a few hundredths. Bottom line? To the best of our knowledge, people are still fairly happy.

This seems to be a good news/bad news scenario. On the one hand, you might expect fewer problems – thus better satisfaction – as the technology matures. On the other hand, as more mass adoption occurs, you might expect more problems – thus lower satisfaction – to be uncovered. Neither of these seems to have happened to a significant extent.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be pouring over the data in detail and seeing if we can detect less-obvious trends. In the meantime, you can still respond to the “Lack-of-Satisfaction Survey” at the link below.