Editor’s letter
HUMANS MANAGE TO straddle the twin posts of cleverness and stupidity with extraordinary levels of grace. I’m not just talking about the apparent dichotomy of a civilisation that has both mastered fire and created TOWIE – I’ll leave that one for future historians – but that we virtually drown ourselves in ephemeral information while ignoring the important data that should be guiding our decisions.
The data I’m talking about here stems from over 6,000 people taking part in our Excellence Awards; outside of the ever-excellent Which?, ours is the only in-depth, longterm, British investigation into how good the tech products we buy actually are. Which begs the question, why?
First, of course, it’s difficult. While the survey doesn’t take too long to complete – just under eight minutes on average – convincing several thousand people to take part isn’t easy. When people have downtime, they’re more likely to be tempted by videos, Facebook streams and Twitter conversations than an invitation to take part in a survey. So, genuinely, thank you to everyone who took the time to provide feedback on the purchases you made.
But what really stops other magazines and websites producing this depth of survey is that we humans don’t care nearly as much about such things as we should. The effort-to-reward ratio isn’t great. Far better to write stories about phones, tablets and laptops.
Because we, as a society, just love a bit of shiny. Like magpies, we’re attracted to headlines (seeing “Trump” in a headline is like catnip to me) and we’re easily distracted by products that glisten under gorgeous lighting. The image appears in our Facebook feed and we can’t help but click.
How boring, in contrast, to think about reliability and customer service and battery life and what that phone will look like a year into its life. Ironically for a brand that’s so associated with being shiny, this is surely one of the reasons for Apple’s success: on average, it’s arguably the most reliable brand across all the sectors, because it understands that having 92% of customers buy from you again rather than 90% has an impact on the bottom line.
But this isn’t the case for all manufacturers. Next time you’re poised to buy a spanking new laptop, I challenge you to check how it fares for customer support – what percentage of people would buy from the company again?
Of course, buying decisions are more complicated than picking the most reliable brand. I’m still using BT Broadband despite Zen Internet and AAISP offering a demonstrably better service. But there are things that bind me to the company: first, it subsidises its SIMs, and both my teenage children are on BT Mobile contracts. I’m also mildly addicted to watching tennis in HD, and BT has the bargaining power to negotiate those deals in a way that Zen, however excellent its customer service, does not.
I don’t have a solution. I don’t have a rousing rallying cry to end on, a proverbial table to thump, a campaign that will get us on the front page of The Daily Telegraph. All I can say is that this is an issue of PC Pro that you should keep close to hand. When you’re about to commit to that broadband contract, buy that laptop or choose that phone, nose through the results in the table. It may not stop you from making your purchase, but at least you’ll have all the information to hand before you do.