When it comes to customer satisfaction, Apple products typically tend to do exceedingly well. Case in point: a new research study by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) finds that Apple is the smartphone brand with the highest customer satisfaction rating, coming in slightly ahead of Samsung and well above LG and HTC. Specifically, iPhone owners in both 2017 and 2018 have a satisfaction rate of 81% while Samsung owners have a satisfaction rating of 80%.
Things get decidedly more interesting once we break up the results across different iPhone models. To this point, the study found that the iPhone 7 Plus actually enjoys the highest customer satisfaction rating with 85%. As for other iPhone models, the iPhone 8 checked in with an 83% customer satisfaction rating with the iPhone X coming in at 80%.
“Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus is America’s favorite smartphone model,” the report reads in part, “topping the brand list with an ACSI score of 85. The large-screen phone outperforms Apple’s more recent models, the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus (both 83). The iPhone X comes in far behind at 80. For iPhone users, the features of the X model are not enough to offset the cost.”
As to how rival devices performed, Samsung’s Galaxy S8 Plus yielded a score of 84 while the regular S8 yielded a score of 83.
Regarding the study’s methodology, ASCI notes that it surveyed more than 45,000 people over the course of about 11 months, from April 2017 through March 2018.
The results here are certainly interesting, but it’s worth noting that other surveys have published dramatically different results. As a prime example, a Tech.pinions study published last month found that 97% of iPhone X owners are satisfied with the device.
When it came to overall customer satisfaction, iPhone X owners in our study gave the product an overall 97% customer satisfaction. While that number is impressive, what really stands out when you do customer satisfaction studies is the percentage who say they are very satisfied with the product. Considering you add up the total number of very satisfied, and satisfied, to get your total customer satisfaction number a product can have a high number of satisfied responses and lower number of very satisfied responses and still achieve a high number. The higher the very satisfied responses, the better a product truly is. In our study, 85% of iPhone X owners said they were very satisfied with the product.
The study also noted that the aforementioned 85% figure is the highest they’ve seen “in all the customer satisfaction studied we have conducted across a range of technology products.”
In short, these customer satisfaction surveys make for interesting talking points, but it’s hard to put too much weight into them when varying surveys yield inconsistent results. That said, ACSI’s full results can be viewed below.
