Er, is it just me or ...
wasn't this survey about customer support? If so, the majority of posters here are missing the point. A customer support survey has nothing to do with how good or bad a company's products are. It is about how well the company handles the situation when things go wrong.
Therefore, if Apple scores highest in such a survey, it doesn't mean their products are better or worse than anybody else's, at least not necessarily. All it means is that they have dealt with problems in a way that their customers were happy with more often than their competitors handled such situations to the satisfaction of their customers. That's all.
I personally don't care which product folks use, I sort out problems on behalf of coworkers no matter which brand. And although I haven't had to deal with Apple as often as I had to deal with other vendors' customer service, I have to say from the observations I made, I can see why Apple's customer service gets significantly higher marks than their competitors.
I noticed that when there are problems of the kind where companies may argue whether or not it is a problem serious enough to replace the product, most computer vendors' customer service reps will put in a lot of effort to try to avoid replacing the product or a part. In my experience, Apple is very easy on that, they are much sooner willing to offer a replacement than other vendors.
I am quite suprised to see Dell being #2 in that survey. My own experience with Dell is not as positive. It has often takes me lots of escalating to supervisors and even higher before Dell customer service was starting to deal with issues we've had instead of trying to argue to make us go away.
With Apple I recall two cases were I was rather pleasantly surprised. In one case one our our junior IT guys had purchased some portable disk drive at an Apple store for some project where things were going hurry-hurry and some items were purchased without the usual process. However, the guy bought the drive with the wrong connector (I think it was a Firewire 400 versus Firewire 800 issue) but instead of returning it right away he unpacked it and fooled around with it to the point where I could have sworn that Apple would not take the damn thing back, the packaging was torn, too. What looked like it made our chances even worse to return the thing was the fact that Apple didn't actually have the one in stock which we needed, so they could not simply replace it. Yet, Apple took it back and refunded the money, no questions asked. Not even any kind of attitude like "We are going to let you get away this time, but next time you check first before you buy!" Nothing like that, they were very friendly and understanding and apologised that they didn't have the model in stock which we needed.
The other experience I recall with Apple was about a power cord that connects from the power supply brick to a Mac notebook. The cable was somewhat bulged right behind the connector and the exec who was using it was about to go on a business trip so he was worried that the cable might break while he is on the road, so he wanted it replaced. I thought there was no way Apple was going to replace something that hadn't even broken yet, just on suspicion that it looks like it might break soon. So I suggested we simply purchase a spare power supply, but the exec said "Trust me, Apple are going to replace it", so I went to the Apple store, and to my surprise, they replaced the thing, no questions asked.
If these cases are not just lucky accidents at our local Apple store, if this is the kind of attitude that Apple customer service staff are taught as a general customer service policy, then I am not at all surprised that they fared so well in this survey.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
