Apple's Service Quality

Apple wants to bring more repair in-house. the effort and expense necessary to keep hundreds of Apple dealers stocked with parts and reimbursed for warranty service is to costly. Plus, by bringing all repair work to a single location, Apple can more easily gather statistics on specific failures and figure out any commonalities in rare problems.

For Apple, there may be a downside to success. Sales are growing three times as fast as the overall PC market. Its iPod music player is burying the competition. And the stylish iPhone is setting the wireless industry on its head. But as Apple pulls in million more customers with different kids of products, it's getting harder to keep them all happy. "The customer base is now more diverse, including students and mainstream consumers, and it's harder to satisfy as a whole," Lopo L. Rego marketing Professor at the University of Iowa who studies customer satisfaction on financial performance.

Apple Inc. still tops all of the big measures of computer-customer service. But there are signs that it is vulnerable to the service struggle of other big companies. A widely watch study of customer satisfaction, Released in August, showed Apple slipping 4 points from last year's score, to 79 on a 100-point scale. That still leads the industry, but it's the company's first decline since 2001. Even though Apple sales are up the customer-service is becoming increasingly difficult because of the new customers Apple is attracting and with new customers its hard to please all of them.

Plus, not all those customers live close enough to get the vaunted high-touch service from an Apple store. For example. Michael Levin, a graduate student in Lubbock, Tex. bought a MacBook laptop. Several times it cracked on the area near its built-in mouse. but with no nearby Apple store, Levin had to make lengthy calls to Apple reps, who initially insisted he must have drooped the machine before they agreed to fix it.