The Grass is Greener on the other side of the cell network

This just in, Verizon iPhone customers are happier with their experience than AT&T iPhone customers.  While not a big surprise, the surprise is in just how big the difference is!

We recently completed an analysis of the Experience Equity for iPhone and RIM handsets. We were repeated the Stanford research that found strong correlation between Experience Equity and sales using Gartner’s Smartphone market update (more on the results of that analysis on a later post).  There was a significant increase in iPhone reviews

starting in Q1 of this year.  After digging deeper, we found most of the reviews were coming from Verizon iPhone users.  It turns out that AT&T does not allow customers to review iPhones on their site.  Because it is the only device you cannot review, we speculate that something in the Apple/AT&T agreement precluded AT&T from publishing user reviews on their site.

To ensure we were comparing apples to apples (or in this case Apples to BlackBerries), we pulled the Verizon data from the iPhone data so we would use the same data sources throughout the analysis and for both markets (turns out the results are the same with the Verizon data in or out).  We were shocked to find how much the iPhone delight scores dropped when we pulled Verizon from the mix.  After plotting the Verizon data separately, you can immediate see why that was the case.  The Verizon iPhone user delight levels were roughly 80% higher than the baseline iPhone users.

Let’s repeat that just for emphasis. The Verizon iPhone experience is rated 80% higher than the AT&T experience.  Turns out making quality phone calls really does matter to smartphone users…