Suck It Blogosphere!

MacRumors is report­ing that some bunch named the American Customer Satisfaction Index have ranked Apple at the top of some cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion sur­vey. But wait, I thought that Apple was doomed by it’s hor­ri­ble hubris to a fate worse than cor­po­rate death. Oh, that’s just what the doucheblogs want us to think. In real­ity, the aver­age con­sumer prob­a­bly hasn’t even heard of the major­ity of the issues that we’ve all been nat­ter­ing about for the last few months.

Let me tell you a story…

Once upon a time, when I was at EarthLink, I was part of the team that was in charge of data gath­er­ing and report­ing for cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion sur­vey data. This means that, among the var­i­ous unpleas­ant things I was respon­si­ble for, I had not only access to the com­piled sur­vey return data but access to the raw stream of sur­vey returns. Of par­tic­u­lar note was the sur­vey com­ments. Based on the com­ments that we were get­ting back, it was obvi­ous that EarthLink was pos­si­bly the worst com­pany on the face of the planet, and we should all kill our­selves out of embar­rass­ment (a the­sis that I’m not exactly disputing).

Now, here’s where it gets amus­ing. The last year I was with the com­pany, EarthLink won a pres­ti­gious cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion award. In fact, we won that award every year I was there, but this year I was on the panel that got to review the results. It was amaz­ing, these cus­tomers seemed to think that we excelled in the very areas that our own inter­nally gath­ered cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion data said we sucked ass in. Of par­tic­u­lar note was email avail­abil­ity. I’d esti­mate that while I was in Tech Support, we never went a day with­out at least 1% of our cus­tomers not hav­ing email prob­lems (sound famil­iar), but the exter­nal sur­vey group rated us higher than all of our com­peti­tors in that regard. What could have caused the discrepancy?

The answer is obvi­ous once I tell you how we gath­ered our inter­nal sur­vey data. We gath­ered sur­vey data by send­ing a sur­vey to every cus­tomer who had con­tacted Technical Support or Customer Service. Simply put, we were sur­vey­ing a pop­u­la­tion that was skewed towards peo­ple who were pissed off at us.

So, what is my point here? Simple: the douchebag blog­gers with their 50 ways to diss the iPhone hit pieces, and the poor saps com­plain­ing about their valid, but fairly rare issues on Apple dis­cus­sion boards, and the bor­der­line crim­i­nal “ana­lysts” with their FUD laden spec­u­la­tion reports are about as rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the actual body of Apple cus­tomers as I am of the mass of Hannah Montana fans. It’s time for the blo­gok­lein­bot­tle to under­stand that.