Distributor services rated by resellers in Context market research

A report has found distributors tend to underperform in new customer acquisition

Resellers continue to rate the vast majority of services provided by their distributors extremely highly, following several years of strong performance.

That is according to market intelligence firm Context and the findings from its latest ChannelWatch report, based on a poll of 5,308 B2B and B2C resellers of all sizes and across a range of core businesses in the UK, Europe, Turkey and South Africa.

The report gathers annual feedback from the reseller community regarding the quality of service they receive from their distributors, scoring them out of five in 14 key areas.

In 2022, ‘on-time delivery' scored highest on average, although most areas recorded a score of around 4/5.

Context claims this highlights distributors are doing well providing support and services across areas such as billing, pre-sales, product availability, customer portals, supply chain and configuration services, and financial and field support.

The analyst added the scores have been "remarkably consistent" since 2020, when there was a notable uptick from the year before in areas including training and certification, channel incentive programmes, configuration services, and field and financial support.

Distributors underperform in new customer acquisition

Only one area emerged as an outlier in "lead generation to help secure new customers", which received an average mark that failed to increase more than 3.5/5 over the past three years.

"We know that many distributors are currently investing in how to help their resellers in this area - for example, through more intelligent use of data to identify new opportunities," said Context global managing director, Adam Simon.

"It's clearly an area where resellers look to them for help and feel that they could do better.

"However, overall there's been remarkable stability in these high scores over recent years, so congratulations are in order to the distributor community."

The report also found that resellers are largely upbeat about the future, despite strengthening economic headwinds.

Around 62 per cent of respondents said they expect their business to perform better over the coming 12 months, a figure that has changed little from 2021, Context claims.