customers

Making a purchase online, especially a substantial one, can be a nerve-wracking process for a consumer. The primary problem, aside from price, is trust. Shoppers negotiate their relationship with the vendor in much the same way they negotiate relationships with any stranger: by seeking information. What an online vendor lacks (and what becomes a disadvantage) is one-on-one interaction with the customer. As such, the customer must put forth additional effort to find out about a product for sale. Making this task easier can make all the difference in closing a sale.

Getting support for any product is often a painstaking and time consuming ordeal. There are parts of Microsoft that I have personally had such trouble with.

iPhone maker Apple ranks highest in overall customer satisfaction among business smartphone users, according to a new J.D. Power and Associates study.Apple received a score of 778 on a 1,000-point scale, doing well in the ease of operation category, physical design and handset feature factors. BlackBerry manufacturer RIM (703) and Samsung trailed Apple in the rankings.

A new study has revealed that print yellow pages are no longer the main way customers seek local information. The internet (through search engines, local directories etc.) is now the top way consumers look for local information.

There are lots of rules for being a decent person. None of them apply to banking, as we’ve seen again and again lately. But you’d think a certain level of smarts would accompany the lack of decency required to run a banking institution, and that level of smarts would include an understanding that when your house is on fire, you don’t piss on the firemen.

 In yet another shutdown of DRM servers, following on the heels of Yahoo and MSN Music,Wal-Mart is also shutting down their DRM servers casting millions of dollars in media locked into one computer, unless you can copy it over to disk. 

Customer satisfaction has proven to be one of Apple's strong points, as indicated by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) this week. Unfortunately, there are still some customers who are far less than satisfied by the company. An Alabama woman named Jessica Smith is one of those customers, and she intends to bring many more of them out into the light with her, by filing a class-action lawsuit against Apple.

Online DVD movie company Netflix said today it is experiencing its worst major outage in its history, preventing shipments of discs to around a third of its 8.4 million customers.The company said it was unable to ship any DVDs on Tuesday, some on Wednesday and none so far on Thursday.