Yahoo and Apple top customer ratings

A recent survey has named Apple as the top PC vendor in terms of customer satisfaction, while Yahoo took home the customer crown among portals.

The survey was conducted for the American Customer Satisfaction Index, a database maintained by the University of Michigan Business School designed to rate customer service among market leaders in various US business sectors.

Yahoo improved its score among web portals by three points to 79, while rival Google saw its score fall from 81 to 78.

This is the first time since 2002 that Google has been beaten to the top spot on the index.

Part of the problem for Google may be the way in which it presents its products, according to University of Michigan professor Claes Fornell.

"For a company that has introduced so many new products and made so many changes, it may be surprising that its homepage has changed so little," he said in a commentary on the report. "It is almost the same as it was in the 1990s."

The other portals named in the rankings included Ask.com and MSN, each of which scored 75. AOL came in last with a score of 67.

Apple was top among PC makers despite dropping four points from last year. Fornell credits much of the drop to Apple's growing sales numbers.

"Apple has experienced unprecedented growth in recent years," said the professor. "It is not easy to manage quality and customer satisfaction when a company has to increase production quickly or provide service to a larger number of customers."

The PC industry as a whole lost an average of two points in the index over last year. Only HP, Gateway and Compaq saw improved scores.

Among those suffering a steep drop in customer satisfaction was Dell. The company picked up four points last year, only to see its score drop back down to its 2005 score of 74, the lowest since 1997.

Dell still retained a higher score than Compaq, however, which held on to its spot at the bottom of the rankings with a score of 73.