It's getting harder to reach Apple tech support, survey says

Apple's tech support ain't what it used to be, says Vocalabs, a company that measures customer satisfaction by interviewing customers immediately after service calls, retail store visits or IVR (automated) interactions. According to the company's report for the first six months of 2011, Apple continued to deliver better telephone support than HP and Dell, but its customer satisfaction dropped 15 points in one year.

"Apple has long had a reputation for exemplary service and support, and consistently tops rankings of service among consumer electronics companies. While the company is still ahead of the pack in many metrics, it has experienced a significant--in some cases precipitous--drop over the past year," Vocalabs' report says.

The main problem, the company says, is in Apple's automated calling systems, and customers showed a 28% drop in satisfaction in that area. During the same period, Dell showed no change in satisfaction, and HP showed a slight improvement.

Apple's drop in automated customer satisfaction is tied to an 11% drop in "ease of reaching agent," when both Dell and HP improved. In short, customers are saying it's now harder to get a hold of a live person on Apple's support lines than it was one year ago.