A recent study has found that Samsung owners are happier and more satisfied with their smartphones that iPhone owners. The study found that Samsung owners scored their smartphones an average of 81 points, while iPhone users gave Apple’s devices 79 points. It is the first time that Samsung has ever scored higher than Apple in customer satisfaction.
According to Business Insider , Samsung scored six points higher on the survey than last year against a three point decrease for Apple. That’s despite the fact that holiday sales for Apple products were much higher than for Samsung. In 2013, Apple was a solid six points ahead of Samsung.
It’s not clear what caused the shift in satisfaction to the favor of Samsung, especially since the company had a difficult year with their profit margin. The profit drop for Samsung was so huge (60 percent) that by the third quarter of 2014, the technology giant was considering pushing into wearable devices and and wireless communication devices.
Much of the profit drop was related to stalled smartphone sales in spite of the high customer satisfaction rating that Samsung later earned in the survey. Part of Samsung’s recovery plan includes more larger-screen devices with a ton of features and lower prices.
The use of smartphones has been steadily growing in the past couple of years; the major downside has been overloaded data and related overage costs.
Customer satisfaction is not the only gap between Samsung and Apple. In the U.S., Apple still sells a whopping double the number of smartphones that Samsung does. Other providers like Motorola Mobility and Nokia (now Microsoft) have a smaller share of the market, but are about neck-and-neck in their positions, while BlackBerry’s market share is now almost non-existent.
Wireless cell phone providers are still led by Verizon Wireless, followed by T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T. As people increasingly use their phones to do more than just talk and text, wireless mobile devices have generally decreased in satisfaction. As smartphones become a greater part of people’s lives, the use of devices that aren’t smartphones has been steadily decreasing.
The rapid decline in function that older models of Apple products exhibit have helped contribute to the general decline in customer satisfaction. One common failure on Apple iPhone’s is that the on/off switch eventually stops working. Apple’s so-called “product refresh cycle” of one year is so long (one year) compared to Android devices (every few weeks or less) that customers who want the updated technology are naturally drawn to Samsung devices.
[Image via Wikipedia]
