Yankee Survey Finds Immature Consumer VoIP Market

Caught wind today of a new Yankee Group survey. The Yankee Group’s recent Technologically Advanced Family (TAF) Survey reveals consumer trends and analysis regarding voice over IP.

Here’s the release:

Yankee Group Reveals VoIP Trends in 2005 Technologically Advanced Family Survey

Consumer confusion challenges VoIP adoption

Boston, MA, November 17, 2005 — Yankee Group today announced additional results of its 2005 Technologically Advanced FamilySM (TAF) Survey, which reveals crucial consumer voice data and analysis for industry players wishing to capture the buying power of early adopter consumers, as well as mass market, late mass market and laggard market segments.

Key survey findings include:

• The VoIP market remains immature. Despite some gains, consumer awareness of the technology is low and confusion remains high. Nearly 35% of VoIP-aware US households do not believe that VoIP is a telephone service that can be used with a regular telephone.
• In 2005, about 38% of VoIP-aware households believe that VoIP telephony provided a better feature set than traditional telephone service representing an increase of 15% since 2004.

Customer confusion is driven in part by the different positioning strategies of the VoIP providers.   For instance, cable companies are positioning their VoIP telephony service as the same as regular phone service which diminishes the need for awareness as a prerequisite to adoption.

“The traditional new product adoption curve is broken with VoIP telephone service,” said Kate Griffin, Yankee Group, program manager, Consumer Technologies & Services. “Traditionally, new technology products educate and build awareness in the early adopter segments of the market, and then progress incrementally toward less technologically advanced segments. VoIP is simultaneously being marketed as a traditional phone product with mass-market appeal and as a new and different VoIP product with appeal to more price-sensitive and technologically advanced segments.”

Although the growth of broadband has helped to increase awareness of VoIP, significant adoption obstacles still exist including customer inertia and service providers’ failure to provide a compelling reason to adopt the technology. The TAF survey revealed that although price continues to be the strongest message, providers’ attempts to expand the value discussion beyond price to incorporate VoIP’s enhanced feature set are starting to show some positive effect.