South African customers have voted MWeb the best Internet service provider (ISP) in a nationwide index which rates SA’s top companies on their service excellence.
At the Ask Afrika Orange Index Awards announced in Johannesburg on Friday, MWeb took first place in its category, which included six ISPs. A total of 154 companies in 32 industries were rated for the index.
The Ask Afrika Orange Index reflects on customer service excellence across industries. The Ask Afrika Orange Index model evolved from extensive international literature, it was adapted, tested and validated for the South African market and is continuously updated.
“Excellent customer service is one of our main focus areas at MWeb and to win this award proves that our customers recognise our efforts to treat them well,” says Ettiene Cloete, GM of Operations at MWeb Connect.
The annual Ask Afrika Orange Index was launched in 2001 to track service excellence in South Africa in the public and private sectors. Ask Afrika surveys a wide cross-section of South Africans on the performance of the top companies in the country to judge how well they fare on customer effort, overall reputation, treating customers fairly, first call resolution and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
The index this year includes 13 new industry categories, including building retail, security and armed response companies, private hospitals, and funeral and burial services, and incorporates the largest call centre customer service benchmark in South Africa.
In this year’s survey “treating customers fairly” was added as a criterion, to determine whether service is perceived as good or bad. According to Ask Afrika, this fairness attribute is particularly important for building customer confidence in a product or service offering. The index also looks at consistency across face-to-face, telephonic, and email customer communication, and tracks how adaptable and relevant companies’ service delivery practices are.
The full results of the awards were published in City Press and Rapport yesterday. Trend diagnostics were presented at an award ceremony and conference held on the morning of 14 November 2014 at Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) in Johannesburg, while the awards ceremony for Cape Town based companies such as MWeb is taking place on 19 November at the Taj Hotel in Cape Town.