EPSI Rating Customer Satisfaction Survey of

the Norwegian Telecom market 2009

This year’s telecom study reveals:

• significant changes for the individual telecom service providers.
• no major change in the overall customer satisfaction with the mobile communication providers both in the business to consumer market (B2C) and business to business market (B2B).
• that within broadband services, customer satisfaction is continuing its positive trend and shows handsome improvements from last year.
• that the service providers with smaller market shares still enjoy higher customer satisfaction and loyalty in the market.
• the common denominator in this year’s study is that the service quality is down in all telecom markets.

Main results at a glance:

Mobile communication:

• Tele 2 has made solid progress in the eyes of the customers, and could be seen as the winner in this survey
• OneCall scores very high and is in a class of its own in the B2C segment.
• Telenor has made significant progress in terms of customer satisfaction and loyalty, both in B2B and B2C. Telenor scores high on product quality compared to its competitors, while Netcom still is perceived as offering the best service quality.

Broadband Services

• NextGenTel enjoys the most satisfied customers in the broadband market for B2B. However, Telenor has also here made significant progress, especially in terms of product quality.
• Tele 2 enjoys both the most satisfied and most loyal broadband customers in the B2C market, primarily due to its perceived improvements in product quality.

2 Mobile Communication- B2C

The business to consumer market for mobile communication services has been measured since 2003. The customer satisfaction has had a positive trend throughout the period, but for 2009 the industry average for customer satisfaction remains unchanged. However, there are interesting evolutions for the individual service providers.

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As Table 1 above states, Tele 2 stands out as the only service provider that can demonstrate progress compared to last year. Tele 2’s progress is in addition substantial, and they have surpassed Chess and now rank as number 2 behind OneCall.

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OneCall is the newcomer in this study, and the results show that the company is very well viewed in the eyes of their customers. Moreover, OneCall scores an impressive 86,6 on loyalty, which is more than 10 points ahead of Tele2 as the number two.
Furthermore, the profile, or the score card, for the various players is seen in Figure 2 above. It illustrates that while the customers have very similar expectations to their service providers, companies like OneCall, Chess and Tele2 distinguish themselves well in terms of service quality and value for money.
Telenor and NetCom, on the other hand, rank lowest in terms of customer satisfaction. In fact, EPSI has never before measured a bigger variance in service quality among the service providers. The market challengers, like the three companies mentioned above, have in the eyes of the customers succeeded to position themselves, intentionally or not, as a provider of good service quality and value for money.

3 Mobile Communication B2B

It is the third year EPSI measures the B2B market for mobile communication. Customer satisfaction and loyalty is slightly up since 2008 (ref. Table 2 and 3 below),

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The study shows that Ventelo, the newcomer in this study, is trailing both Telenor and Netcom in customer satisfaction and loyalty. Telenor has made substantial progress from the customers’ standpoint, both in terms of customer satisfaction and loyalty, where they have gained 4 and 5 points respectively.
The group ”Other”, where we find companies like Network Norway, Hello, TDC and Phonero, has fallen behind in terms of satisfaction and loyalty, while in terms of service quality they still perform relatively well (ref. Figure 2 below).

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4 Broadband B2C

Broadband service providers in the B2C market have been measured since 2007, and the good news is that customer satisfaction continues to improve.

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Compared to 2008, Tele2 has made significant improvements in the eyes of the customer, and is this year the number 1 in terms of customer satisfaction among the named service providers (ref.Figure 3 above). Moreover, the analysis shows that Tele2 also outperforms their competitors in terms of loyalty.  Telenor has also made fine progress overall since last year, while the score for NextGenTel remains stable. GET, the newcomer in this study, lags behind their competitors on most aspect from the customers’ point of view.

5 Broadband B2B

2009 is the third year EPSI measure the corporate market for broadband in Norway. Here EPSI has only captured enough observations to show independent results for Telenor and for NextGenTel. Overall, the corporate customers are more satisfied with their broadband service providers compared to 2008, and have also expressed that they are more loyal to their current service provider.

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The category “Other” where we find service providers like Tele2, Ventelo, TDC, BKK and Eidsiva, still outperforms Telenor and NextGenTel. In the category Service Quality (ServQ) it differs more than 11 points between “Other” and Telenor. Nonetheless, both NextGenTel and Telenor have made nice progress compared to previous years.

6 International comparison

The Mobile Telecommunication industry has been measured in the Nordic countries since year 1999 in annual studies. The coverage has successively been increased to more and more European nations and in 2009 some central and Eurasian countries have been added. In addition, we now also cover data communication (broadband) in most of the countries. In the following, the first benchmark results for 2009 are reported.
In the Table 4 below, the private consumers in the respective country give the scores for their mobile phone operator.

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The four main North European/Nordic telecom provider TDC, Telenor, Tele2 and TeliaSonera with their respective brands in different markets have been studied over the last few years, Among these Pan-Nordic telecom companies, TeliaSonera performs best also in 2009, followed by Tele 2, TDC and Telenor. However, all the others have improved significantly in many markets. It is worth noting that none of the main providers is the customer favourite in every country and segment.

7 Background information on EPSI survey

Information for this survey was collected by telephone interviews in September-October 2009. The respondents were asked to give their evaluation of the telecom operator they use. The objective is to interview 250 randomly chosen customers of each analyzed operator and, where applicable, both private as well as corporate customers. The respondents thus represent a random sample of each operator’s own clientele. In total, the number of interviews conducted in the European survey is more than 40.000. In Norway nearly 3.500 interviews were done.

This customer satisfaction survey has been conducted at the same time and in the same way in all Nordic and Baltic countries plus Azerbaijan, Czech Republic, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Russia. All is a part of the Extended EPSI Rating program, which is coordinated by the EPSI Research Services Ltd, who also is responsible for R&D together with the Stockholm School of Economics.

Responsible for the coordination of this survey in Norway is the EPSI Norway CEO Fredrik Høst.
Fredrik Høst                 Tel. +47 48 86 76 01       fredrik.host@epsi-norway.org
Professor Jan Eklöf       Tel. +46 7069 64185       jan.eklof@epsi-rating.com