There's been a lot of angst in the media and some financial circles over how well iPhone X has been performing compared to previous, less expensive, less audacious models. According to a new study, though, customers are happier with Apple's flagship phone than ever before.
Ben Bajarin, writing for tech.pinions:
When it came to overall customer satisfaction, iPhone X owners in our study gave the product an overall 97% customer satisfaction. While that number is impressive, what really stands out when you do customer satisfaction studies is the percentage who say they are very satisfied with the product. Considering you add up the total number of very satisfied, and satisfied, to get your total customer satisfaction number a product can have a high number of satisfied responses and lower number of very satisfied responses and still achieve a high number. The higher the very satisfied responses, the better a product truly is. In our study, 85% of iPhone X owners said they were very satisfied with the product.
Emphasis his.
That number is amongst the highest I've seen in all the customer satisfaction studied we have conducted across a range of technology products. Just to contrast that with the original Apple Watch research with Wristly I was involved in, 66% of Apple Watch owners indicated they were very satisfied with Apple Watch, a product which also ranked a 97% customer satisfaction number in the first Apple Watch study we did.
While tech twitter and tech YouTube amplify complaints to near ear-popping and brain melting levels — and sometimes for good reason — year after year, launch after launch, it's clear that customers don't just like their iPhones... they increasingly love them.
That's the kind of reaction, I think, that may not be impossible for companies that don't own and craft the entire process from silicon to pixel, but would be very hard for any company that couldn't make the resulting product more than the sum of its integrated atoms and bits.
The one sore spot in consumer sentiment is exactly what you'd expect:
I can do a whole post on early adopters opinions of Siri, but since it's on the chart, I just want to make a few points. Firstly, you may think it's odd for us to include Siri in this since it's not a feature unique to iPhone X. While this is true, we included it since it is designed to be a core feature of the iPhone but also for the unique optimizations with on-device performance and machine learning that exist with Siri on iPhone X due to the new processor design. The main point, however, is a reflection of an insight I mentioned earlier that early adopters are more critical than mainstream consumers of technology. This is reflected in this chart but also highlights something important. Just because a demographic may be early tech leading, or even fanatical about Apple, Siri ranking low with this cohort shows that they are also quite pragmatic and ready to criticize when necessary.
Since Apple owns the whole widget, and Siri owns the first assistant slot on the widget, any time iOS is updated or anyone upgrades to a new iPhone, there's an opportunity to re-introduce Siri and, hopefully, make a better next impression. (Especially when and if splashy new features get added.)
Apple seems to be aware Siri is a dull spot on an otherwise shining product experience at this point, especially with HomePod where there's literally no keyboard or multitouch interface to hide behind.
Now let's see what the company can do to fix it.
