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Follow UsThe Channel Satisfaction Survey (CSS)-2001 has come at the right time. With
recession becoming official in the US and taking its toll world over, vendors
are at crossroads. The sneeze in the US economy has given a cold all over the
world and vendors are looking at every means to improve their business.
Herein comes the relevance of CSS-2001 which provides invaluable grass-root
level feedback from partners to vendors. The survey has brought to the fore
solid data on the areas where vendors need to work on if they want to
successfully partner with the channel.
Vendors are already busy scaling down operations and cutting down costs. It
is at this time of restructuring, CSS-2001 attempts to give feedback to vendors
on what they must do to enhance their business in the coming days.
The results of CSS-2001 clearly indicate that vendors have room to improve in
every single criteria including product quality/reliability, technology updation
in products, creation of consumer demand and pull, warranty programs and
advertising support, among others.
The satisfaction levels for these criteria have not even touched the ‘very
good’ level, leave alone ‘excellent’. Currently, the satisfaction levels
are only between ‘good’ and ‘very good’ showing that there is vast room
for improvement.
The parameter where vendors need to give maximum attention is the training
support they provide to partners. CSS-2001 clearly points out that partners
remain the most dissatisfied in this area.
On a scale of one to five, where one stands for poor and five stands for
excellent, partners have given a score of only 2.9 to training support which is
the least score they have given to any of the 15 different parameters of
satisfaction.
Going by the measuring scale, the satisfaction level of partners with respect
to training remains only at ‘average’. There are serious implications of
this feedback. What the partners are saying is that they are selling products
and technologies with only half-baked information.
The time is right to reinforce training of partners because with business
taking a downturn, they have spare time at hand. Vendors should use this time
fruitfully by bringing partners up-to-date on their latest solutions.
It’s not that vendors are not doing this. What partners are saying is that
what is being currently done to train them is not satisfactory enough. Partners
want vendors to spend more time on training so that the former become fully
equipped in their business.
If vendors fail to act positively on this feedback, the situation could lead
to disastrous consequences in the long run. In-depth knowledge about products
and technologies is a must for all partners which alone can put them on the road
to success. In the absence of this, business would only suffer.
Any investment on training is an investment for future. A fully informed
channel alone is in a position to do justice to the state-of-the-art products
and cutting-edge technologies that IT is known for.