Apple Tops Consumer Reports List

memoryhole writes "It seems Apple has come out on top in recent Consumer Reports surveys regarding technical support and hardware failure. Way to go Apple!"

Comments

No questions asked

[awtbfb]

I had the misfortune of having my logic board fried by an "analog" hotel phone line within the first year of owning my Powerbook. Apple swapped it out for free.

Free Airborne shipping back & forth too.

That's only part of the story...

[Chief Typist]

Subscribers will see that the eMac scores higher than the low-end machines by Dell, HP, Sony, Gateway and eMachines. Even with a higher price it gets a better overall score.

They say nothing about it having a one button mouse, though :-)

Also: the Consumer Reports website is an excellent source of information. Well worth the monthly or yearly subscription.

Re:Apple's customer base wont settle for poor serv

[mooredav]

it's quite funny sometimes when they get all riled up and resort to the old "I'm gonna trade it in for a PC" line.

You just described me.

The motherboard on my first Mac died one month after the warranty expired. I wouldn't pay for a new motherboard. I told the repair rep that I'd replace it with a PC. She gave me a phone number. I guess it was their pissed-off-customer hotline. The new rep agreed to cut the price in half, so I bought the repair.

My iBook returned less than 72 hours after I mailed it across the US. Still works great today. Count me in for a new G5 / PowerPC 970.

Re:I agree, most of the time.

[Mononoke]

Why they would say "yeah, we'll give support to this child in new york, or this parent in washington state, but forget those floridian college students"?

You can thank Florida for that. Their regulations on extended warrantees are so ridiculous that most companies won't even bother to do extended warrantee business in the state.

I'm not suprised

[el_munkie]

I bought my first mac a few months ago, a 12" iBook, and it has been badass. It had a catastrophic failure at one point that rendered it unable to boot. I got on the phone with Apple and they sent me a box the next day. I shipped it on a Tuesday night, waited a day, and it was waiting for me at work on Thursday with a new mobo and processor.

Apple's custormer support has impressed the hell out of me, and this will not be my last Mac.

As a former AppleCare support agent...

[AshBean]

...I can tell you that customer satisfaction at Apple was job one. Unlike a lot of companies (like the company who's product I support now), Apple believes that customer support is integral to their business and outsourcing support to other companies in out of the question. (Actually, to be accurate, they used to outsource a portion of their support when I was there, mainly for call volume overflow purposes. They may still.)

Sure, Apple like any other business has limits, and has to say no to customers sometimes, but it was pretty rare when I was there. They had very clear and specific lines of escalation for all manner of customer issues.

Another thing is that the agents take a lot of pride in their work, and are given a lot of latitude in helping customers. Not only are customers satisfied, but the support agents are satisfied too.

I've tried to apply all that I learned at Apple to where I'm working now, and it's helped me be the best Macintosh support agent here, and among the top 1% of all agents, which admitedly isn't hard considering that 98% of the rest are all Windows product related agents.