eBuyer, Insight and Softcat top customer satisfaction rankings

As part of Top VARs 2018, we asked over 250 end users to rate the IT suppliers they have dealt with

Etailer eBuyer finished top of the pile when we asked over 250 IT decision makers to rate their encounters with the UK's top resellers and MSPs.

As part of Top VARs 2018, we questioned end users large and small on a range of topics, from what is happening to their IT budgets and whether they prefer to buy direct or through the channel, to what top tips they would have on how resellers can engage with them in a post-GDPR world.

You can read the full research findings on p32 of the report.

We also presented them with a list of the UK's top 50 VARs* by revenue (based on last year's Top VARs report), and asked them to select all the ones they had dealt with or were aware of. We then asked them to indicate whether their encounters with each had been positive or negative. This question used a slider button, with zero being extremely negative, 50 being neutral, and 100 being extremely positive.

We were surprised by the high volume of data this question yielded. No VAR received fewer than 70 responses. Five - BT Business Direct, eBuyer, Softcat, Capita IT Solutions and Daisy - are apparently household names among end users, receiving over 150 responses apiece (see below). The average (mean) response level stood at 100.

Generally, end users appear to have had neutral, or just better than neutral, encounters with their VARs. Across the 50 resellers, the average (mean) satisfaction score was 51.4, with most deviating from that average by only a few percentage points either way.

Only one firm - eBuyer - received an average score of over 60, which is testament to the high esteem the East Yorkshire-based online reseller and retailer must be held in by the majority of its consumer, prosumer and SMB customers (see below).

Seven other VARs boasted average scores above 55, with global reseller juggernaut Insight leading the chasing pack with a score of 59.3 per cent. Softcat, Scan and Computacenter rounded out the top five.

Although it may be unwise to search for too many patterns in this data, there was a high correlation between brand awareness and brand satisfaction, with the top three highest-rated firms all among the top seven most well known.

* The list included only 49 firms: SoftwareONE's name was omitted from the survey in error