Research group shows iPhones cost less to support

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(PhysOrg.com) -- ClickFox, a firm that analyzes customer experience when trying to solve problems with their technology has focused its attention on how much work and cost is involved in supporting and troubleshooting problems related to the three main kinds of smartphones; the iPhone, Blackberry and those running Google’s Android OS. They found that iPhone’s are cheaper to support than Blackberry’s and Android phones are the most expensive of all.

ClickFox reached its conclusions by analyzing support data from North American carriers; after eliminating call data for questions about billing or queries about plan options, the company found that calls for assistance with iPhones were generally handled more expeditiously than those for Blackberry and even more so than for Android calls.

ClickFox, though not revealing exact figures noted that the main difference between the types of support were the number of calls that had to be transferred to other support reps, i.e. difficult problems often require the assistance of more than one support rep to get resolved. ClickFox says that the number of transfers for iPhone callers is fewer than for Blackberry users, and far fewer than for Android users.

In an interview with InfoWorld, analytics director for ClickFox , Lauren Smith said that Blackberry users cost support carriers a total of $46 million more to support than iPhone users did for their support, while Android users cost theirs $97 million more.

ClickFox suggests the disparity is due to the higher degree of difficulty in learning and using the Blackberry and Android phones versus the iPhone, resulting in confused users calling support lines only to find the reps oftentimes confused as well. ClickFox says that while iPhone users typically have their questions or problems resolved on the first call, Blackberry users find themselves transferred to another rep 37% of the time; and Android users get transferred a staggering 77% of the time.

This announcement by ClickFox comes at a bad time for Android users as reports from the recent DefCon Hacking conference in Las Vegas, suggest that the Android OS has a flaw in it that allows one app to change the focus of another app without user consent. Worse, the offending app can apparently also disable the Back button, preventing the user from going back to the original app. Security experts say such a flaw, in addition to being annoying, can allow a secondary app to masquerade as the first, setting up the user for a phishing attack.

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Research group shows iPhones cost less to support