The Angry Drunk

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.

Posted on August 19th, 2008 under Posts • Tags: Apple, blogorama, iPhone. •  Print This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback