satisfaction

A damaged Sprint Nextel is righting its ship with a newfound focus on customers, but big moves like this take time.

On Tuesday, Dan Hesse, the company's CEO, will be on stage at Forrester Research's Customer Experience Forum in New York City to discuss the company's efforts to improve its brand image and customer satisfaction levels. In 2010, Sprint emerged as one of three firms with the biggest improvement in Forrester's annual Customer Experience rankings based on a survey of more than 4,600 consumers.

Sprint, which is the third largest wireless provider in the U.… Read more

The Federal Communications Commission said Wednesday that one in six U.S. mobile-phone customers have been shocked by unexpected cell phone fees on their bills.

The agency conducted a survey of roughly 3,000 Americans and found that about 30 million Americans, or one in six mobile users, have experienced a sudden increase in their monthly bill that is not caused by a change in service plan. The survey indicated that 84 percent of respondents said their mobile carrier did not contact them when they were about to exceed their allowed minutes, text messages, or data downloads. And about 88 … Read more

If you're a systems engineer who wonders whether you've chosen the right profession, I bring you good news.

Please take a deep breath, stand up, and be prepared to leap so high, you will touch the sky. Then you will, perhaps, want to touch the Skyy. For a survey has declared that systems engineer is the best job in America.

Focus.com, perhaps spurred on by the grumbling that can be heard from so many places of work in the world, performed this most important of tasks.

The site first looked at more than 7,000 jobs. It … Read more

Americans are apparently quite happy with their Internet search options.

That's the conclusion reached by a survey of U.S. consumers conducted earlier this year by the American Customer Satisfaction Index and scheduled to be released Tuesday. The Internet portals and search engines category--made up of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft--scored an 83 on the index, far ahead of the score of 75 amassed by the PC industry.

Google leads the industry in both market share and customer satisfaction, posting a score of 86. That's one of the highest satisfaction scores recorded by any one company, said Larry Freed, … Read more

In a poor economy, some budget PC brands are finding its customers happier than ever, according to this year's installment of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, an annual study completed by the University of Michigan each year.

In the 2009 rankings for PC makers, which are set to be released Tuesday, the brands whose rankings saw the most improvement were Compaq and Gateway. Compaq's score of 74 represented an increase of 5.7 percent, the largest gain among computer makers in the last year, and equaling the highest customer satisfaction ranking for the brand--owned by Hewlett-Packard--since 1996. The … Read more

Quick question: What's the difference between a Netbook and a notebook? Apparently, a lot of people aren't sure.

Only 58 percent of consumers who bought a Netbook over a notebook said they were very satisfied with their purchase, according to a study released Tuesday by researcher NPD Group. That compares with a 70 percent satisfaction rate from consumers who planned on buying a Netbook from the start.

NPD found that the level of dissatisfaction stemmed from confusion over the capabilities of a Netbook. The study, "NPD's Netbooks II: A Closer Look," discovered that 60 percent … Read more

Amazon snared an upgrade from Piper Jaffray Monday based on a customer service survey and e-commerce innovations such as the Kindle and its associated iPhone application. However, the reasoning behind the upgrade is debatable.

In a research note, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster acknowledged that he was fashionably late to the Amazon party. That hint indicates that this Amazon upgrade is really about Munster playing catch-up. Munster is upgrading Amazon shares to a "buy" from a "neutral."

Here's a look at Munster's reasoning:

Amazon's customer service. Piper Jaffray surveyed 300 online shoppers and … Read more

If you subscribe to a broadband Internet service today, more likely you use cable than DSL. According to a study released Thursday by J.D. Power and Associates, cable modem usage is increasing at a faster rate than DSL usage among Internet customers, as dial-up use continues to decrease.

The firm has performed the Internet service provider residential customer satisfaction study for 11 years. Every year, the study measures customer satisfaction with high-speed and dial-up Internet service providers based on five factors: performance and reliability, cost of service, customer service, billing, and offerings and promotions. It uses a 1,000-point … Read more

Although many of the results of J.D. Power and Associates' annual poll of digital camera purchasers aren't surprising, some stuff just doesn't add up.

The results, which were released Thursday, sent me searching its site for a description of the survey and rating methodology. But I couldn't find one.

For example, Digital SLRs: Nikon and Canon are, unsurprisingly, rated best among the 8,000 people polled. But Nikon's ratings in the 4 categories--picture quality, performance, operation, and appearance--are 3, 5, 5, and 4 dots, respectively. Canon's are 4, 3, 3, 2. Yet both get 5 dots overall.

So if the overall rating is from a survey, people are perceiving the cameras as more than the sum of their parts (which actually makes sense). But if the overall score is based on a mashup of the subratings, then J.D. Power needs a little more transparency than: "Please note that J.D. Power Consumer Center Ratings may not include all information used to determine J.D. Power and Associates awards."

Poor Olympus, Pentax and Sony's ratings in all but appearance are 2 dots; 3 dots means "about average," but 2 dots means "the rest." So what does 1 dot mean?

Then take the Premium Point-and-Shoot category, which is ruled by the Canon G series and the Panasonic TZ series. However, this category throws in such disparate subcategories as megazooms (Canon S and SX series, Cyber-shot H series, Olympus SP series, Kodak Z series) and regular old expensive compacts (Canon SD series, Panasonic FZ series) with the enthusiast cameras.

Based on the ratings, Panasonic beats all for megazooms and Canon's SD are the favored expensive compacts. But the surveyed indicated that what they liked most about the Canon SD is its appearance; everything I've heard from people says the opposite (they love the photo quality and performance but just tolerate its looks).… Read more