Apple, HP deliver best customer experiences from PC makers: report

Hewlett-Packard might be moving full throttle into the 3D printing space, but it might not want to move too far away from general consumer tech just yet.

A new report from the Temkin Group, a customer experience research and consulting firm, has published a new scoreboard, ranking the best customer and user experiences produced by the computer industry going into 2014.

For what is said to be the fourth year in a row, Apple offers the best customer experience for a PC company.

When looking at businesses in general (meaning anything from auto dealers to fast food chains), the Mac maker ranked 119th overall out of 268 companies across 19 industries.

HP held on for the silver medal for the second year in a row, not terribly far behind Apple in the computer industry rankings but 144th overall across all industries.

Toshiba, Acer, Lenovo, Gateway, Dell, eMachines, Sony, and Compaq round out the remaining top 10, respectively.

Most of these tech giants actually saw their rankings and reviews improve, except Compaq and Dell. Temkin researchers highlighted that these two were the only computer makers whose ratings declined between 2013 and 2014.

Overall, the computer industry seems to be on an upswing as far as customer service goes, being analysts noted the computer industry was one of the 15 industries to see its ratings improve over the least 12 months, tied for 11th place out of 19 industries.

For reference, the results of the annual report stem from the surveyed responses of 10,000 U.S. consumers. Participants are asked a series of simple but pointed questions, including "How easy is it to work with the company?" and "Can you do what you want to do?"

The complete 2014 Temkin Experience Ratings leaderboard is viewable online now.