The newest American Customer Satisfaction Index is out and, no surprise here, Apple’s iPhone tops the list as the best cellphone out there in terms of customer satisfaction.
Back in 2010, when the iPhone 4 first came out, Steve Jobs told reporters that the phone only had a 1.7% return rate, indicating that people seemed to like the best-selling device.
Now it’s official.
“Apple (iPhone) leads the field by a long shot, while RIM (Blackberry) lags behind as the least satisfying,” the report stated.
This is bad news for the fading RIM, which is pinning all of its hopes on its upcoming BlackBerry 10 platform.
“‘Companies with weak customer satisfaction often have weak stock performance,’ notes [ACSI founder Claes] Fornell. ‘RIM’s sales are slumping amid a bevy of problems, from hardware and software issues to server lapses that have caused email and messaging outages. Over the past year, share price for RIM has virtually collapsed.’”
“At [a rating of] 83 [out of 100], Apple’s iPhone is a game changer when it comes to customer satisfaction. No other cell phone company has ever broken into the 80s. Apple’s nearest competitors this year are three companies tied at 75: Nokia (+3%) and ACSI newcomers LG and HTC,” the report continued.
Surprisingly, Samsung, which makes some of the best selling non-iPhone handsets out there in the form of its Galaxy S series, is “a below-average score of 71.”
The report also contained potential bad news for Google.
“Motorola declines 5% to 73 and ties the aggregate of smaller manufacturers (-1%). This may be unwelcome news for Google as it hopes to make the most of its Motorola acquisition and widen the user base for its Android operating system.”
On the service side, the report also rated carriers, with Sprint Nextel “nominally grab[bing] first place among the big carriers.”
I don't consider it very prudent to taint RIM's future so bleakly, or even to mention it a paragraph after mentioning the iPhone – they serve different market sectors, and quite frankly, the market sector needing an ergonomic reliable phone is much bigger than the affluent iPhone touting market. Add to that; the fact that Tracfone have gotten the rights to host RIM's Black Berry BBM's from Simple Mobile (and T-mobile), there will be a huge push from Black Berry entering the prepaid market, and what with Tracfone being by far the largest prepaid vendor in the US, RIM has a strong opportunity to re-establish itself.
I like BBM's
Ergonomically – YES!