“For Apple, there may be a downside to success. Sales of the Cupertino (Calif.) company’s Macintosh machines are growing three times as fast as the overall PC market. Its iPod music player is burying the competition. And the stylish iPhone is setting the wireless industry on its head. But as Apple pulls in millions more customers with different kinds of products, it’s getting harder to keep them all happy,” BusinessWeek reports.
“‘The customer base is now more diverse, including students and mainstream consumers, and it’s harder to satisfy as a whole,’ says Lopo L. Rego, a marketing professor at the University of Iowa who studies the impact of customer satisfaction on financial performance,” BusinessWeek reports.
“Apple Inc. still tops all of the big measures of computer-customer service. But there are signs that it is vulnerable to the service struggles of other big companies. A widely watched study of customer satisfaction, released in August by the University of Michigan, showed Apple slipping 4 points from last year’s score, to 79 on a 100-point scale. That still leads the industry, but it’s the company’s first decline since 2001,” BusinessWeek reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Daily Reader” for the heads up.]
As you sell more products to more people, it’s inevitable for problems to increase. Apple should work even harder to offset this phenomenon. The good news is that the new customers are usually coming from such inferior experiences (Windows, ugly PC hardware, also-ran MP3 players, portable CD players, bad software, also-ran online music outfits, etc.) that Apple is usually a revelation.