The quality of customer service Apple in the US over the last nine months has fallen significantly, Cnews reports citing a report from research company StellaService. If in the fourth quarter, “Apple”, the company ranked third for quality of service, in the II quarter of 2015 — the last in 25th place in the ranking.
StellaService measures the level of customer service on a daily basis, determining the quality of service delivery of goods from online store, assessing the quality of the procedure of refund, and quality customer support.
Apple was the only company in the electronics segment in the report StellaService. First place in the ranking took the company L. L. Bean (clothing and footwear for outdoor activities), the second — Mr. Porter (clothes, shoes, accessories for men), the third — Shopbop (designer clothes), the fourth — David Yurman (jewelry), fifth — Net-A-Porter (designer clothes).
As for the quality of service delivery Apple was number 14. It was determined on the basis of parameters such as processing time, ease of payment, availability of product damage during shipping, delivery time, etc. for Example, the processing time decreased from 3.1 to 2.6 days.
Apple also took 14th place for the simplicity of procedure of refund if the buyer for some reason delivers the goods back to the store. An average return of funds in the company takes in this case is 4.4 days. This is about half compared to other electronics stores in USA.
It is noteworthy that the iPhone maker has not entered the Top 25 companies on the quality of customer support, which takes into account the quality of service by phone, email and online chat. To determine this parameter StellaService uses the average time required for the specialist.
As it turned out, in the second quarter of 2015, the time of access to technical support professional Apple has increased four — fold from 30 to 121 seconds (average rate in the segment is 128 seconds). At the same time, the proportion of solved problems increased to 99%. The waiting time in the online chat has also increased from 34 to 63 seconds. It is on average 20 more than the average in the segment. In addition, an increased number of problems to solve that specialists in the chat was not capable of (the effectiveness of problem-solving decreased from 97% to 94%).
Increase timeout from Apple experts, is a consequence of the increased customer base and the inability (or unwillingness) of the company to appropriately scale resources, analysts say. For example, after the start of sales of smart hours Apple Watch in April 2015, the waiting time of a specialist over the phone practically tripled, and in the Internet chat — six times.
