We publish an annual report that examines what consumers do after a good or bad experience. So we decided to do that same type of analysis to examine how IT decision makers in large North American organizations respond to a good or bad experience with a tech vendor. As you can see in the chart below:
- Most share feedback inside their company. After both a very good or very bad experiences, the top thing that IT decision makers do is to tell their colleagues within their company. They are slightly more likely to share good experiences this way.
- They don’t share a lot in social media. Less than one out of 6 IT professionals say that they’ve shared their experiences in an online community, on Twitter, or on Facebook.
- They’re more likely to share negative feedback with vendors. Forty-two percent of IT decision makers share their bad experiences directly with tech vendors, but only 33% share their good experiences. This is the largest gap on the list.
As you can see above, IT decision makers are more likely to share bad experiences with tech vendors than they are to share good experiences. So the feedback that tech vendors hear will often be negatively biased.
We examined this negative bias across 64 tech vendors for which we had data from at least 40 of their clients. The chart below shows the feedback behavior of tech vendors’ clients (how they provide feedback across tech vendors). As you can see, Tech Mahindra and TCS are the most likely to hear negatively biased feedback from their customers.
The bottom line: Tech vendors hear more bad news than good news.
This blog post was originally published by Temkin Group prior to its acquisition by Qualtrics in October 2018.
