Customer Satisfaction: PC Industry uniformly good, still lags Apple

According to the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index, a national economic indicator of customer evaluations of products and services put out by the University of Michigan, top US PC vendors are all rated uniformly good (within a point of each other), however lag Apple by a significant amount. Dell, HP and Gateway/Acer have all been criticized in the past for customer support quality issues, all scored between 73 and 75 on the index.  Apple, on the other hand, rated an 84, clearly outpacing the PC industry.

Let’s not disparage the PC OEM’s on this one.

I will always argue that Apple is in essence a Luxury brand. Their products, while some will argue are superior, also cost a significant premium to comparable technologies as offered by the “WinTel” vendors. Why should you expect to have better customer support for that price?

The question that this begs – does Apple dominate this statistic because of better customer service? Or does the product generate a better customer experience, setting up Apple’s Customer Service teams for success?