First large scale Apple Watch customer satisfaction study
Wristly Apple Watch Insider’s Report #12
July 19th, 2015
We are thrilled to publish Wristly’s first Apple Watch Customer Satisfaction results. Over the last week, our Wristly panel crossed the 1,100 subscribers mark and more than 800 of you completed this week’s survey.
We are able to state, with a high degree of confidence, that the Apple Watch is doing extremely well on the key metric of customer satisfaction. This appears to be contrary to speculation from what seems to be a majority of Silicon Valley tech pundits.
Apple Watch Customer Satisfaction at 97%
Barely three months after launch, v1.0 of the Apple Watch has reached an amazingly high level of customer satisfaction from the 800+ respondents in our panel. Specifically, while 31% of our panelists are “somewhat” satisfied with the Watch, an astounding 66% are already “very satisfied / delighted” by it. Summing these two figures yields an Overall Customer Satisfaction rating of 97%, which is an indicator that should vindicate many of the people involved in the creation of this new product.
The Watch Comes in Ahead of the Original iPhone & iPad!
In one of the most important results of this week’s analysis, we compared Wristly’s customer satisfaction results for the Apple Watch with previous customer satisfaction results conducted by ChangeWave Research for the first generation versions of the iPhone and iPad. The results were, in fact, very positive for the Apple Watch, as a 97% customer satisfaction rating places it ahead of both of these beloved Apple “v1.0” products! Only time will tell if the sales results also play out accordingly, but for now this is a very strong early indicator of Apple’s product execution for its first wearable product.
Not in tech? You love the Watch even more!
As many of you may have noted in the last month or so, there has been a groundswell of opinion that the Watch might not be doing very well. This has been fueled, in part, by a study utilizing e-commerce data from digital receipts, but mostly by several industry pundits’ reports discussing personal observations of their Watch usage. To test this thesis we decided to analyze the satisfaction score by cohorts of users in our panel.
Last week, we found that 9% of our panel members work in tech and specifically have a job building or marketing mobile apps (“App Builders”) with another 34% classifying themselves as having different roles within the Tech industry (“Tech Insiders”) — the balance (also the majority at 53%) are comprised of everyday users of the Apple Watch (“Non Tech Users”). When we analyze this week’s customer satisfaction through the lens of this grouping, we see significant differences emerge in the degree of satisfaction for the Watch.
If looking at the “Satisfied” + “Very Satisfied” numbers for the “Non Tech Users“ cohort , the result is only bit higher than the other two cohorts. But when we look specifically at the “Very Satisfied” category, the differences are staggering — 73% of “Non Tech Users” are delighted vs 63% for “Tech Insiders”, and only 43% for the “App Builders”. We are quite confident of this trend as it maps closely to the prior Net Promoter Score (“NPS”) research we conducted last month, where most of you claimed that the watch was good but only for certain types of early adopters. Today, we can see clearly that the mainstream consumers in our panel (and perhaps across the world?) are delighted with their Apple Watches!
The Price is Right!
In addition to the satisfaction score, our research suggests that Apple priced the device right.
When asking our members for their perceived value of the Watch, the very large majority stated that considering its cost, the Watch was a good (73%), or even very good (14%) value. Only 12% of you thought that the Watch was a poor value relative to cost.
We noted some significant differences in this rating across the two primary Watch models and surprisingly the stated perceived value is significantly higher for Apple Watch owners versus the Sports version. We will investigate this further in upcoming research.
We will conclude the satisfaction portion of this report by sharing another revealing insight. We gathered that a very large portion of our panel is either Likely (27%) or Yes, definitely (14%) going to purchase at least one other Apple Watch for someone else in the near term.
Top Likes/Dislikes of the Watch
Creating a line of products with a wide range of build materials and sizes is a new approach for Apple, and there have been questions regarding whether Apple could pull off a consistent experience across so many options. We asked some more detailed satisfaction questions to find out where the Watch has hit a home run, and where there may be some opportunities to improve over time.
Apple has, in fact, done it again, creating a product that gets high marks for Design and Build Quality. An astounding 80% of you stated being “Very Satisfied/Delighted” with Build Quality and 74% were “Very Satisfied/Delighted” with Aesthetics/Design. When looking at satisfaction overall (Very Satisfied and Somewhat Satisfied together), both Build/Quality and Aesthetics/Design scored an incredible 95% satisfaction rate.
Satisfaction scores for Ease of Use and Features/Functionality reflected strong positive sentiment as well, with 91% of the panelists saying that they are either Very Satisfied/Delighted or Somewhat Satisfied. But the breakdown on these two categories is somewhat different. Ease of Use, and especially Features/Functionality, has 43% and 50% of panelists respectively saying they are Somewhat Satisfied, showing there is room for improvement as the product matures and also potentially pointing back to different expectations for the Watch based on buyer profile (tech vs non-tech users). Given some of the known limitations of OS1 and limited third-party app availability, Apple has an opportunity to get the somewhat satisfied users into the delighted category with the upcoming OS2 update, and continued growth of the third-party ecosystem.
Compared to other aspects of the Watch, Performance/Battery satisfaction scores came in lower, with only 28% of users saying they are Very Satisfied/Delighted, and 12% saying they were Somewhat or Very Dissatisfied.
As you may have expected, we are also seeing some significant differences by gender. Women are more satisfied with the Watch’s ease of use, with 58% saying they were Very Satisfied/Delighted, vs men at 47%.
This coming week our research will focus on understanding if and how the Apple Watch induces wearers to enjoy a more healthy and active lifestyle. Be sure to check our site next week for the findings and if you have an Apple Watch and want to register your opinion, please join our panel, you’ll be first to get these insights and more.
To finish, a big thank you to the 1,100+ members of the Wristly Inner Circle — we wouldn’t be able to learn so much so fast about the Apple Watch without your weekly contribution. We also would not be here so fast without the help of Ben Bajarin who, over the last weeks, has been instrumental in helping us expand.
Ben, during normal work hours is Principal and head of primary research at Creatives Strategies, a premiere boutique market intelligence — check out his work it’s worth it!
We welcome your thoughts and comments on how we can improve the project moving forward. Do not hesitate to reach out to us at info@wristly.co