BlackBerry is facing a mass exodus – of both business and consumer customers – following last week’s system crash, with the vast majority considering switching to the iPhone.
Shopping comparison website Kelkoo interviewed more than 1,000 BlackBerry customers and found that 19 per cent are thinking about moving to another manufacturer, while 42 per cent will think about changing when they next change their handset. Some 62 per cent said they would opt for an iPhone above all other brands as a replacement.
The findings of the Kelkoo research tally with rival comparison site PriceRunner.co.uk, which found that 63 per cent of BlackBerry users would consider switching phones as a result of the outage.
The studies follow reports that BlackBerry’s brand reputation has plummeted. They are reinforced by news that Royal Bank of Scotland is the latest company to turn to Apple to test its confidential corporate communications offering. RBS will now trial the use of iPhones and iPads following the BlackBerry failure, with Bank of America and Citigroup also looking elsewhere.
The findings signal more bad news for Canadian smartphone maker Research In Motion (RIM), which has been criticised for its sluggish response to the outage and a lack of communication with its customers.
RIM founder Mike Lazaridis belatedly took to the web on Thursday (October 13) to apologise for the outage, which affected customers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas.
The outage, which BlackBerry initially said was the result of a problematic network switch and an unsuccessful failover system, was originally seen as affecting consumers and business-people in small companies that link into the BIS consumer data centre.
But many of the world’s largest firms also use the service, called BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and experienced serious problems.
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