Monday at the COMPTEL PLUS Fall 2008 Convention & Expo in Orlando, research firm ATLANTIC-ACM will present its Metro Carrier Excellence Awards based on the results of ATLANTIC-ACM's 2008 Metro Wholesale Carrier Report Card, which invites wholesale customers to evaluate the performance of their carriers. ATLANTIC-ACM has done carrier benchmarking research since 1995 for the industry.
Customers rated their carriers according to six service characteristics, including brand (reputation), sales representatives (knowledge, credibility, integrity, responsiveness and consultative ability), provisioning (installation and timeliness), network (reliability and SLAs), customer service (repair, responsiveness, expertise, problem resolution, efficiency), and billing (accuracy, dispute resolution, flexibility and timeliness). They also rated the value of products, including ATM and frame relay, colocation, DIA, Ethernet, integrated access, high-speed access (waves and SONET), switched access and VoIP.
ATLANTIC-ACM will give an award to an ILEC and to a CLEC for each of six service characteristics, as well as one for voice value and one for data value, combining quality and price ratings. The companies themselves will be able to announce their winning scores on a specific product.
“The overall quality of service ratings for carriers continues to improve over the many years we have been rating carriers,” said ATLANTIC-ACM CEO, Dr. Judy Reed Smith. “The shifts of players due to mergers in the local arena bring new names into the mix to join the consistently best-in-class performers.”
