We conducted a survey amongst our customers to learn how we can improve ourselves. The results are very encouraging. Besides a faster network and better uptime, people are mostly looking for easier ways to top up their prepaid SIM cards.

Mobile Vikings started in the beginning of 2009 with a small group of enthusiastic users. People involved in social media, web design and software engineering were the primary target of our mobile internet offer. Thanks to this, we managed to establish a healthy line of communication with our users over Twitter, Facebook, email and blogs.

Now that we have grown, we also have a lot of users who are not that active online. This also means there are now a lot of users we never hear from. This is why we have set up our customer survey.

Within 24 hours of posting our survey, we received more than 1.000 answers. To our big surprise, a lot of people also made the effort to write down a personal comment. We certainly appreciate this and we are still going through each and every comment to see how we can improve upon your remarks.

When we look at the statistical results, there are a couple of things that stand out. Overall, our customers are happy to be with Mobile Vikings. This is not so trivial, as telecom operators have the lowest customer satisfaction numbers of all industries. This is in part due to the complexity of the business, its price plans and its service bundles. But we are convinced that what aggravates customers the most is having to deal with staff that is not empowered to make decisions and that has to follow illogical and complex procedures. We try hard to make a difference in that area and it looks like it's starting to pay off.

The most requested features are 3G (we’ll communicate about this shortly), a better network availability and easier ways to top up. We learned SMS based top-ups are your favourite. Since most people prefer to have the top-up amount deducted directly from their bank account, we will go through with this and implement a direct debit system. We expect to have this live in January.

We are sharing the summary of all responses so you can check for yourself. 

Thanks to everyone who participated!