Once upon a time, Apple was a company with a limited user base, and this allowed them to give everyone good treatment, when talking about customer support. Unfortunately, there's a rule that won't be broken anytime soon by a large number of companies saying that once you increase quantity below a certain level, quality goes down. I know, I know - there could be found examples where this doesn't apply (today's CPUs, for example), but that's not the point. Today, we'll talk about Apple's descent when looking through its customers' eyes.
According to The American Customer Satisfaction Index, Apple's customers are no longer happy with the support they receive as they were a few years ago. As Professor Claes Fornell, head of the ACSI at the University of Michigan says, "The American consumer has long been the single biggest force propping up the U.S. and the global economy, but declining customer satisfaction combined with weaker demand for U.S. exports may make it difficult for American households to shoulder the burden of being the locomotive for world economic growth."
Well, at least things aren't going too bad for Apple, since sales are now extremely high, but the problem is that customer satisfaction growth is much lower than sales growth. This is like a time bomb - if the situation continues to stay this way, one day Apple may find itself right in the middle of a customer satisfaction crisis, as it happens with Microsoft and Windows Vista these days.
The interesting part is that we're not only talking about Apple going down here, since the entire personal computer industry is facing a customer satisfaction drop. Anyway, we should also consider that Apple is more than just a personal computer manufacturer, and the satisfaction of iPhone customers is a very important piece of its future. For now, there are plenty of iPhone 3G problems, and plenty of happy customers, so we should wait a little longer for things to become clearer.
"It’s hard not to be impressed with Apple. This is product extension at its best where the new products, iPod and iPhone, are helping bring new customers to existing computer products. The fact that Apple is not dependent on the Windows Vista operating system hasn’t hurt either," concluded Fornell.
So...what's your opinion? Is Apple going down, or is this just a temporary problem?
