Fun beat functionality among smartphone users who are increasingly more consumer-oriented than business and like their Web and entertainment more than business users like their e-mail and calendar functions. But they both could stand to like their operators a little more, according to new research from the CFI Group called Smartphone Satisfaction Survey: Smartphones, Providers and the Customers Who Love (and Loathe) Them.
The iPhone may be the best device ever created by the wireless industry and has made AT&T a lot of money and brought on a lot of new users, but it hasn’t done much for the company’s customer satisfaction ratings, which were lowest by far. And in general, users are happier with their smartphones than they are with the mobile operators who support them.
Surveying more than 1,000 customers using American Customer Satisfaction Index methodologies to compare smartphone platforms, the iPhone is the undisputed leader in customer satisfaction, scoring 83 on a 100-point scale – 8 percent higher than its nearest competitors, Android and the Palm Pre (77).
Smartphones popular among business users, like Research In Motion’s BlackBerry (73) and Palm’s Treo (70), trail significantly in customer satisfaction, while the “others” category, which includes Symbian and Windows Mobile, scored 66 satisfied out of 100.
One surprising finding for Doug Helmreich, program director at CFI Group and Phil Doriot, company vice president, was the big gap between people who had AT&T all along and those who migrated to the company to get the iPhone. “Those people who migrated over have a much lower satisfaction rate,” Helmreich said. “People who had them before are certainly not delighted, but happier than those who came over for the iPhone.”
Overall satisfaction with smartphones is pretty good. “Generally, customer satisfaction scores in the 80 [percentile] are very good and the 70s are doing pretty good. So they are doing well,” Helmreich said. “And generally, the provider doesn’t do as well as the hardware, so they are doing okay, too. But there is room for improvement. AT&T customers for instance, love their phone a lot more than they love AT&T.”
To read the full, in-depth article at xchange’s sister publication, Billing & OSS World, click here.
