Amazon, Barnes & Noble, HP Top Customer Service Survey

Whether you’re in the market for a new smartphone or a new car, customer service is a key factor in determining your brand loyalty -— just ask anyone who’s been on hold waiting for a representative for more than five minutes at a time.

For the second year in a row, the Amazon Kindle came in first place in top customer experience ratings, according to Temkin Group’s Sixth Annual Customer Experience Ratings. Amazon’s tablet received an overall rating of 73 percent, putting it ahead of rivals such as Barnes & Noble and Apple..

Barnes & Noble’s Nook took second with a rating of 61 percent and tied with HP, while Apple dropped a surprising 8 percent from its previous ranking in 2015, with an overall rating of 60 percent.

The survey included 10,000 U.S. consumers, asking them to rank companies across 20 different industries based on three criteria: company “success,” determining if the product allowed users to do what they want to do; “effort,” which assesses how easy it was to work with the company, and “emotion,” or how consumers felt about their interactions.

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In our reviews of overall best and worst laptop brands, we ranked Apple in 1st place and HP in 6th, according to various criteria including design, warranty, software, innovation, value and tech support. HP ranked significantly higher on Temkin's survey, meaning those polled may have had a better time with the laptop maker than we did.

Barnes & Noble was the only company to improve their overall ranking by one full percentage point between 2015 and 2016, according to Temkin Group. However, our reviews found that Nook’s recent removal of Nook Video and UK Nook stores created more problems for the troubled e-book seller.  

Overall, the computer and tablet industry averaged a 59 percent rating in the 2016 Temkin Experience Ratings and came in 9th place out of 20 different industries. This rating decreased by four percentage-points between 2015 and 2016, dropping from 63 percent.