Enterprise Satisfaction With Providers Up; Emphasis on Innovation and Execution Growing

 Overall customer satisfaction with providers up 5% versus last year, ISG Star of Excellence CX Insights Report finds

Enterprise buyers of technology and business services are more satisfied with their providers than they were last year, even as they place greater emphasis on innovation and service execution, according to a new report from Information Services Group, a leading global technology research and advisory firm.

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“Likewise, they expect better execution and delivery, to get more bang for their buck, so to speak.”

The latest ISG Star of Excellence CX Insights Report, a quarterly review that sheds light on what enterprise buyers think about their service and solution providers, shows overall satisfaction with providers in the second quarter, as measured by average enterprise CX score, increased 5 percent, to a score of 74 (on a scale of 1-100), versus the prior year. Satisfaction scores were up in all six dimensions measured by ISG, with particularly strong increases for “Governance and Compliance” and “Collaboration and Transparency”, both up 7 percent versus the prior year. Compared with the first quarter, the overall CX score was up 13 percent sequentially.

Importance ratings on “Innovation and Thought Leadership” and “Execution and Delivery” saw the biggest jumps in the second quarter versus the prior year, increasing 11 percent and 10 percent, respectively. Execution and Delivery, with an importance score of 81 was the highest-ranked dimension for enterprises.

“Enterprises clearly expect more innovation from their providers to transform their businesses and drive future results, especially in a time of economic uncertainty,” said Heiko Henkes, ISG director and principal analyst in charge of the study. “Likewise, they expect better execution and delivery, to get more bang for their buck, so to speak.”

Henkes said improving satisfaction scores, versus last year and the prior quarter, reflect a budding optimism among enterprises about the future of their partnerships with providers.

“After hitting a low point in the first quarter, reflecting the depths of enterprise uncertainty with the global economy, satisfaction scores have rebounded in the second quarter,” Henkes said. “Viewed through the lens of cost optimization, enterprises were expecting a great deal from their providers at the beginning of the year. Now they realize they are in the same economic boat and are turning more optimistic about what providers can do for them in the future, with advances in automation on the horizon and excitement over generative AI.”

The ISG report noted enterprise customers were particularly satisfied with their providers’ ability to maintain effective cybersecurity measures (for the Governance and Compliance dimension) and define project milestones and efficiently execute handoffs between teams (for the Collaboration and Transparency dimension).

In addition to overall CX scores, the second-quarter report focuses on CX scores by technology domain, following on from the first-quarter report, which examined CX scores by industry. Future reports will spotlight CX scores by geographic region (third quarter) and wrap up the year with an annual analysis (fourth quarter).

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CX Scores by Technology Domain

Enterprises were most satisfied with providers of enterprise service management (ESM), with a CX score of 82; cybersecurity services, with a CX score of 81, and contact center – customer experience services, with a CX score of 79.

In the IT outsourcing (ITO) sector, cybersecurity (up 15 percent), ESM (up 11 percent) and software-defined networking (up 9 percent) saw greatest year-over-year improvements in CX scores, the ISG research found. In the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector, the biggest CX gainers were finance and accounting (FAO) services, up 11 percent, and contact center services, up 7 percent.

Intelligent automation and data analytics, supply chain services, and cloud-native technology services (including containers and serverless architecture) received the lowest satisfaction scores from enterprise customers. The report recommends providers of these services improve resource allocation and cost efficiency while co-innovating with their customers, and in the case of cloud-native technology, improve engagement with the open-source community.

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