apple news/media reports

08/14/2007, 1:45pm, EDT

Tuesday, August 14th

Apple customer satisfaction slides 5%

Apple remains the industry leader of customer satisfaction despite falling 5 percent in the eyes of consumers since the second quarter of 2006 according to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index. The Cupertino-based company along with Dell helped to drag down the entire PC industry 3 percent in total. Apple's score now stands at 79. Dell, meanwhile, continues to experience customer service problems that have pushed the company back near the bottom of the PC rankings with a score of 74. HP improved 1% to 76, though its Compaq division is the worst in the industry at 73.

Professor Claes Fornell, head of the ACSI at the University of Michigan, believes Apple's decline may be related to the company's outstanding performance. "Apple has experienced unprecedented growth in recent years," Fornell said. "As Toyota can attest, it's not easy to manage quality and customer satisfaction when a company quickly has to increase production or provide service to a larger number of customers." Dell, conversely, ultimately worked its way back near the bottom of PC rankings, according to The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

Meanwhile, Yahoo! improved 4 percent to 79 to take the lead over Google for portals and search engines. The ACSI attributes the change to a number of design changes and enhancements that it says are paying off for Yahoo! in higher customer satisfaction, which will be "critical to turning around this year’s lackluster financials."


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sliding 75%.....
0
08/14, 6:08pm, EDT
is what happened to M$ after the launch of vista, so sliding 5% isnt really that big of a deal.

(this is complete speculation)
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined Jun 2007
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nice headline
0
08/14, 7:42pm, EDT
totally misleading and sensationalistic...same as always...
biased...
0
08/14, 9:31pm, EDT
Not to mention the survey itself is totally biased. The company's webmaster's sister is dating a neighbor of the nephew of a waiter working at a coffee shop that Bill Gates' secretary's cousin used to frequent.

Well, it has to be - why else would Apple's customer satisfaction rating be lower?
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small range
0
08/15, 1:12pm, EDT
is there really that much difference between a company that rates highly at 79 (Apple) and the worst company (Compaq) at 73? That seems like a rather small range of difference. I would expect the range between best and worst to be on the order of 20 points or so, if we are talking about a scale from 0 to 100.
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I think they sample..
0
08/15, 9:33pm, EDT
I think they sample like 10,000 customers. Keep in mind what apple's market share is on the computer side, and 79 percent with iPod in the mix.. is pretty incredible!
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Joined Mar 2003
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