Chris Stening, Easynet Connect MD believes service is best B2B differentiator

Chris Stening believes success in the business ISP market is different from the consumer sector, relying far more on quality and service than price alone.

While he claims Easynet Connect, where he is Managing Director, will always be competitive in price, he is adamant that value is only one of the three success factors for a business ISP and telecommunications infrastructure provider.

“Businesses obviously want value, but price is only one of the three things they really look for,” he says.

“The other two are reliability and high quality support if things don’t go to plan. That’s why we’ve got a UK call centre with staff who are measured by how many first time fixes they can complete over the phone. We can currently claim a success ratio of 95% and if we can’t get it fixed in that first phone call the person taking the call is responsible for the problem, we don’t let the customer phone back and then have to start dealing with someone else.”

Are you being served?

Aside from being part of Sky, and so being able to offer clients access to more than 6,000km of fibre and many unbundled exchanges, Stening believes it is service, as well as product, which businesses need. This has become all the more essential with bandwidth-hungry applications, such as video viewing and remotely hosted applications which many businesses and their staff are using.

“Companies are increasingly coming to rely on their internet connection to do business,” he says.

“Many of our customers, just like us, are run through applications hosted on the web and so they just can’t operate if their staff are not online. In fact, three out of four of our customers tell us that they couldn’t bear to be offline longer than an hour, the business implications would just be too huge. So, just like a guy running a frozen food business would have a back up electricity generator, we advise they have a separate back-up line to connect to mission critical applicaitons so the company never suffers any downtime.”

Breaking up is not hard to do

This reliance on hosted applications and the importance of two-way communication means Easynet Connect often introduces its customers to the notion of moving away from ADSL, which prioritises downloads over uploads, to SDSL which gives equal weighting.

It is only by being able to discuss needs with companies and then come up with solutions which have a good level of customer service behind them that Stening believes business ISPs can survive. Nevertheless, he believes there is a misconception among companies that switching ISP is complicated.

“Our research has found that three in four companies have suffered outages and nearly one in three are unhappy with the speed and service they get, yet only something like 10% of companies are actually looking around to switch ISP,” Stening explains.

“So I think there’s a misconception out there that changing your ISP is going to be really problematic. That’s why we tend to run a parallel service for companies so they don’t have to make an instant switch and can see the network they’re joining is up and running before they move over.”

Sky’s B2B wing

Stening launched Easynet Connect at the start of 2008 having previously run its sister company UK Online which caters for micro businesses with one to ten employees. Connect was established to serve SMEs with 11 to 250 employees and remains a part of BSkyB which also runs the well-known Sky Broadband consumer product which Stening ran for the latter half of 2006 before joining UK Online in 2007.

He remains convinced that while he may not always offer the cheapest solution, business broadband is driven more than the consumer market by the need for reliability and quality because if a person’s home connection goes down it is annoying but if a business loses connectivity it can be catastrophic.

Hence while Sky will compete very heavily on price in the consumer market, Stening is clear that while price is obviously of great importance, it is not the only consideration. Easynet Connect will continue to seek to differentiate itself on its network and level of customer service rather than price alone.

Tags: ADSL, Broadband Fibre, bskyb, Business ISP, Chris Stenning, Easynet, Easynet Connect, llu, SDSL, Sky, UK Online