Resellers continue to rate the vast majority of services provided by their distributors extremely highly, following several years of strong performance, according to CONTEXT, the IT market intelligence company.
The findings come from CONTEXT’s latest annual ChannelWatch report, based on a poll of 5,308 B2B and B2C resellers of all sizes and across a range of core businesses in Europe, Turkey and South Africa.
As one of the world’s largest online IT reseller surveys, it delivers critical insight into industry trends as well as the mindset and purchasing intentions of the channel community.
Every year the report gathers feedback from this reseller community about the quality of service they receive from their distributors – asking them to give a score 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.
That shows distributors are doing a good job of 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 scores have also 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.
Only in one area, “lead generation to help secure new customers”, has the average score failed to increase past 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. It’s clearly an area where resellers look to them for help and feel that they could do better”, said Adam Simon, Global Managing Director at CONTEXT. “However, overall there’s been remarkable stability in these high scores over recent years, so congratulations are in order to the distributor community.”
In similarly positive news, the ChannelWatch 2022 report also revealed that resellers are largely upbeat about the future, despite strengthening economic headwinds. Some 62% of respondents said they expect their business to perform better over the coming 12 months, a figure that has changed little from 2021.
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