Reliability and Service Awards 2006

feedback: www.pca.com.au. Hopefully the winner will be rewarded with a boost in sales, but they’ll be under even greater pressure to deliver now.

Notebooks

Winner: Asus
Highly Commended: Apple

Retailers say that notebooks are now outselling PCs 60:40 and the survey in part agrees with their point of view.

However, the desktop survey (not reported here; see PC Authority January 2007 issue 110) shows that many people build their own PC these days and that desktops are hardly a dying breed. So in a way it’s more important to know about the reliability and service of a notebook because people are unable to build one themselves and are at the mercy of a company they probably only know by brand, hearsay and reputation.

More than 5300 notebooks were bought by our 8000-plus readers and most of Australia’s major manufacturers received the minimum 100 votes required to compete. Results varied a fair bit.

In terms of reliability, Apple, Asus, Sony and Toshiba saw around 90 percent of customers satisfied or very satisfied with their notebook’s reliability (the latter two scored lower because they had slightly more dissatisfied customers). Dell, the only company to break 1000 responses, followed with 85 percent, along with IBM. HP and Compaq saw 81 percent positive response rates and Acer trailed with 77 percent.

An average of 74 percent of respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with customer support. Apple was some way ahead of this mark with 84 percent; Asus followed closely behind with 83 percent. Dell, Sony, Lenovo and Toshiba rated in the 70s, Acer dropped to 69 percent and HP and Compaq dropped to 66 percent and 64 percent respectively.
In terms of complaints, an average of 5 percent of respondents said getting through to sales people was a problem. This dropped to 2 percent for Apple and Lenovo but rose to 7 percent for Compaq and Dell. A troubling 12 percent (average) of respondents claimed they had difficulties getting through to support personnel. This dropped to 7 percent for Asus, and 9 percent for Apple, Lenovo and Toshiba respondents. But it rose to 14 percent for Acer and Compaq and peaked at 16 percent for HP customers.

On average, 9 percent of respondents had trouble understanding the sales and/or support people but results varied widely across the manufacturers. Kudos to Apple: not a single respondent had difficulties here. Only 3 percent of Sony customers had these problems, 5 percent of Asus and Lenovo customers did as well and 6 percent of Toshiba customers did too.

More troubling was 13 percent of HP customers complaining and 17 percent of Dell customers doing likewise.

Telephone courtesy caused 6 percent of respondents to complain (on average), though Compaq was higher with 10 percent and HP worst again with 12 percent.

Repairs taking longer than promised was generally high at around 10 percent with Acer and HP rising to 14 percent. Dell was best with 7 percent.

Suppliers trying to wriggle out of warranties troubled 5 percent of respondents, though Dell and Lenovo saw only 3 percent complain here while a worrying 12 percent of Sony respondents complained.

But these problems didn’t always translate to customer satisfaction. This rating was measured using one-third of respondents’ “Value for money” satisfaction response and two-thirds of their “Would you buy from the same company again” rating. Not surprisingly 91 percent of Apple users said they would buy an Apple notebook again but Asus was not far behind with 90 percent. However, 88 percent of Dell users said they’d buy Dell again.

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