According to a new study from the Yankee Group, 73% of Apple iPhone users are very satisfied with AT&T’s service, a number well above the industry average satisfaction score (69) and AT&T’s score for all phones (68). So what explains this satisfaction given two years of complaints and AT&T’s customer satisfaction scores traditionally falling at the tail end of the spectrum? Researchers guess that users are so in love with the phone as an all-purpose device, they transfer some of this adoration over to AT&T via a “halo effect”:

“Consumers transfer the high gloss of their Apple iPhone experience to AT&T,” says Carl Howe, Yankee Group analyst and author of the study. “The iPhone creates a halo effect that rubs off.” In other words, iPhone customers’ praise for their network may be a result of the famous “reality distortion field” that surrounds Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) CEO Steve Jobs and his company’s products. But AT&T says its network really isn’t as bad as many people think. It’s a perception problem, not a service problem, in the company’s eyes.

Instead of acknowledging the problem and explaining again how they’re working on shortcomings (which they certainly are), AT&T has to insult peoples’ intelligence by suggesting the problems have been hallucinatory in nature. Being unprepared for wireless traffic surges AT&T consistently sees coming isn’t a “perception” problem, and it can’t be fixed by more PR.

One thing that’s also happening in terms of AT&T’s satisfaction rates in the Yankee study is the firm didn’t bother to study users by region. Many of the angry AT&T iPhone users tend to be in San Francisco and New York, where congestion wreaks havoc on AT&T’s network. Unlike say in Cleveland, where users have a completely different experience on the AT&T network (like the ability to make phone calls on major highways).

Link to the original article…