Apple tops customer satisfaction poll as rivals' ratings slide

Windows Vista to blame?

By Tony Smith, 19th August 2008

Apple has been named the computer maker that most satisfies its customers after it scored a personal best of 85 out of 100 - ten points above its nearest rival, Dell - in a key US customer satisfaction index.

The figures comes from the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), a survey that's been run by the University of Michigan since the mid-1990s. Its latest numbers are based on data collected in Q2.

Dell's score of 75 was a small increase over the 74 points it achieved in 2007 but enough to put it into second place ahead of last year's number two, HP. It also put it just ahead of the industry average of 74 points.

HP scored 73, Gateway 72, and HP's Compaq business 70. The Others category rated 72.

"This is product extension at its best, where the new products, iPod and iPhone, are helping bring new customers to existing computer products," Michigan professor Claes Fornell wrote in the latest ACSI report.

"The fact that Apple is not dependent on the Windows Vista operating system hasn't hurt, either."

That said, the survey was conducted before the arrival of the iPhone 3G and Apple's MobileMe debacle. How well, we wonder, will it hold up next time round?

The ACSI scores take into account how punters feel about a company, its products and service, good or bad. The organisation monitors a wide array of business sectors. The ACSI for each company is based on a sample of 250 customer interviews, conducted by telephone, with more than 65,000 interviews conducted annually, the organisation said.

Customers of all companies are selected from national and regional probability samples by screening a randomly chosen adult in each telephone household.

Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything

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Posted Friday 22nd August 2008 12:01 GMT

Alice Andretti

Viruses, happy days, customer service...

@Daniel B, about Mac viruses: "there was another one with a V logo (can't remember its name)"

Probably Virex; they had a V logo. I used Virex for a while before switching to NAV (Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh) back when I was still using System 7.5.3-rev-something-or-other. NAV did actually apprehend one genuine Mac virus once; I forget what it was called.

@Nick Fisher: "Yep, my first Mac was a 2 Mb LC running System 6.0.7." "I remember paying for the VRAM upgrade so I could have 8 bit colour on a 13" screen." "Happy Days!"

Yep :) I hear ya, man. I like the old OS's. Well, some of 'em, anyway. VRAM upgrades - yeah, did one of those just a few years ago - to a whopping ;) 4 MB total VRAM - so I could use a modern big PC monitor after the last of my several old Apple Multiscan 15" monitors went bye-bye. That allows millions of colors at 1152 x 870 on the main 19" monitor. With a palette monitor on the side (dual monitors, via also-4MB ATI PCI card) for Photoshop tinkering, it's okay. :) Oh by the way, I have one of those 13" Apple monitors like you mentioned - I bought it used in the 1990s and - amazingly - it still works (it was my palette monitor for a long time) - although it's gotten dimmer and a little warped in recent years, maybe taking after me. ;) I still use Mac OS 8.1 (with appropriate 3rd-party tweaks to make it more user friendly, like getting rids of stripes in list view windows, open/save dialog-box enhancements, etc), after years of stubbornly refusing to budge from System 7.x.

Back to the topic, about customer service, I've had several distinctly different experiences with Apple customer service, ranging from excellent (back in the '90s when everyone thought Apple was dying) to truly awful (after Apple was back in the black and flying high - hmm, well, maybe coincidence, maybe not). I suppose if one were to average them out, they'd be, well, average. However the last customer-service experience was the awful one, so it's fresher in memory and it's part of the reason that, a few years ago when I had to choose whether to buy a PC or a Mac, I chose a PC. It's just hard to forget an incredibly bad customer no-service experience - makes a person not want to spend money there anymore, or ever.

From what some people are saying here, though, modern Apple seems to have repented ;) and put the focus back on customer service, so my earlier bad experience with Apple customer service might not be relevant in today's world. I'm still wary of them though.

Ideally, as I think someone else might have already pointed out, one would not *need* customer service because there wouldn't be very many occasions for its use in the first place (defects, DOA, whatever). Not realistic though.

Posted Thursday 21st August 2008 10:37 GMT

Neil Hoskins