PC Authority Reliability and Service Awards 2006

by Nick Ross on Sep 20, 2007

We’ve examined the data from more than 8000 readers to reveal exactly what sort of reliability, customer service and satisfaction you can expect in 2007.

The 2007 PC Authority Reliability and Service Awards are on again! Vote for the products that have served you well (or slam the ones that have made your life difficult) over the past year to win your share of $40,000 in prizes!

PC Authority’s Labs testing has established itself as the best and most vigourous in all of Australia, but there are some things we simply can’t check ourselves. It’s all very well to say that a product is packed with features, performs great and is good value, but what if it has a habit of falling apart as soon as you get it home? What if its manufacturer consistently tries to wriggle out of warranties? These factors and more should make a big impact on whether you buy a product in the first place, but we are normally left to rely on hearsay and brand reputation as guides to a product’s reliability or a company’s service. This month we cut through the gossip and find out what products are really like to live with.

What makes this survey so special is that it’s based on your feedback alone. Every single star rating you see beside a manufacturer’s name is founded upon your buying experiences. To even qualify, we demand that at least 100 readers must have bought a piece of equipment from each manufacturer. So rather than rely on a single word-of-mouth recommendation for a manufacturer, rely on 100 recommendations – or warnings in some cases

It’s the biggest and most-comprehensive tech survey ever done in Australia and we’re publishing the results in full: warts and all. It means that if you’re considering a purchase from any of Australia’s major manufacturers, if you’re wondering whether you can trust online shops or if you’re wondering which ISP will give you the least grief, you’ll be able to see at a glance how they’ve performed over the past two years.

How we test
We take the same vigorous approach to testing customer satisfaction that we do when we test new products in a group test. While other magazines call their surveys ‘customer satisfaction’ when all they really ask is ‘who is your favourite manufacturer?’, we ask a series of in-depth questions to discover the real-world experiences our readers undergo.

The principle is simple enough: whether a PC, notebook or peripheral, we ask who you bought your IT equipment from and then dig deeper. How satisfied were you with reliability? How satisfied were you with customer support? For a general customer satisfaction score we ask the killer question, ‘Would you buy a product from the same company again?’ and factor in respondents’ perceptions of ‘value for money’ if pertinent to that category.

We then analyse all the data to create a set of statistically valid results, which we convert into star ratings: