Why you’re better off buying boutique broadband

When it comes to consumer reviews, telco companies usually get a pretty bad rap. Consumer conducts an annual survey of the ‘major’ telco players in New Zealand, and each year the telco giants make the headlines for poor customer service and support.

Voyager Internet CEO, Seeby Woodhouse, is reminding Kiwi consumers that there’s a lot more choice available than what’s represented in the Consumer survey.

Seeby said: “New Zealanders are fortunate that they aren’t forced to just choose between two or three big providers. There are smaller providers in the market, like us, who offer a more personalised, boutique customer service experience.”

With 15,000 residential and business broadband customers, Voyager Internet is one of the more ‘boutique’ internet providers who isn’t included in Consumer’s survey, and according to Seeby, not been grouped with the bigger players is a positive rather than a negative.

Seeby said, “We see the larger telco’s get pulled up for long wait times, slow speeds, and poor customer service, despite them spending millions of dollars telling people they are the fastest, the cheapest, and the best at customer service. If that’s what it means to be a big telco, we’d rather stay as we are! We don’t spend millions on advertising; we choose to put our profits back into the company in terms of staff training and investing in new and innovative technologies, and our personalised and technical customer service, we believe, is what sets us apart.”

“In terms of measuring customer service, we hold ourselves accountable with open reviews on our social media and Google pages and more recently with an NPS survey as part of our onboarding process for new customers.”

NPS stands for Net Promoter Score, it’s a globally used method of measuring how likely a customer is to recommend an organisation, based on a scale of -100 to +100. According to research agency Perceptive, the average NPS score for an Internet Service Provider in New Zealand is -1. Voyager is currently recording a score of +58.

Seeby said, “We implemented NPS scoring to benchmark ourselves and identify areas for improvement, and although we already had confidence in our product and customer service, even we were a little surprised at such a high score. We’re viewed as a small provider in New Zealand, yet our NPS score puts us in the same league as some of the world’s leading companies.”

According to QuestionPro, an NPS score over 50 is considered ‘excellent’, a rare descriptor for telecom companies. Other organisations who share Voyager’s 50 – 80 space include Amazon, BMW, and Apple, as reported by Index NPS.