iPhone vs Android CSAT Study

It’s interesting how often public opinion and marketing affects things like customer satisfaction. Sometimes it seems like people, as a whole, get these opinions that they simply can’t shake, despite ample evidence to the contrary. This happens often with things like the Prius, which people still believe costs more to make than the Hummer, even though the “researcher” that made that claim has been widely debunked .

One of the more current examples comes from the anti-iPhone crowd. While the iPhone is certainly not a perfect piece of technology (the dependency on iTunes is a tremendous inconvenience), it is an extremely well made phone. The screen remains crisp and clear, the apps run nearly flawlessly (and when they do have problems, it is usually due to the app creator, not the phone), the phone rarely crashes and so on.

As someone that is generally unimpressed by technological innovation, the iPhone is one impressive device.

Yet when I first got the iPhone, I immediately heard a very vocal group of both technology lovers and technology novices telling me that I would hate it, and that I should have instead gotten a different phone, most pointing me to either the HTC or the MyTouch. For various reasons, they claimed that those two phones were far better options, and I would be much more satisfied as a result. If one were to perform market research on this group, the iPhone would get far lower scores than either of those phones.

Usually they own one of these phones, and they often tell people how much they like it. But if you actually play around with the phone while talking to them, suddenly they do something very strange: They start to make excuses for all of their phones’ problems. The touch screen isn’t responsive.

The apps crash option, including the ones that come with the phone. The screen gets fingerprints that don’t wipe off easily. Each and every one of them starts to complain about various features of their phone, while I have nothing bad to say about my phone and gladly hand it off to others without hesitation.

I’m not exactly clear what has caused this discrepancy, but I do find the basic idea fascinating – people hate a phone they haven’t used, love their phone when they talk about it to others, but make constant excuses for their phone any time they let other people see it. Somehow these companies have created a culture that is causing these users to believe the product is amazing, even when in practice they seem to dislike a lot of its features. This is an idea that I wish I could explore further.