YouGov, a UK based market research company, says that its Smartphone Mobile Internet eXperiences tracker (SMIX) indicates thatNokia has substantially improved its level of customer advocacy and loyalty in the last three months of 2012. Between September and December the number of Nokia customers that said they would recommend it rose by 13% to 45%, with detractors falling from 37% to 33%. 

This shift coincides with the launch of Nokia's Windows Phone 8 devices in the UK and suggest that general consumer perceptions about the company's smartphones are changing for the positive. YouGo provides supporting evidence for this idea with data that shows Nokia is now ranked first in the market for a number of lesser attributes measured in the SMIX survey (battery life, camera quality, speed of call connection, and robustness of handsets) and has also improved it rating in a number of other areas (reliability, function speed, ease of use).

YouGov also said that, in the run up to Christmas, Nokia enjoyed the biggest improvement in customer loyalty among handset manufacturers and that there was a 12% improvement in the number of customers saying they would buy a Nokia next time they purchased a phone (up from 30% in September 2012 to 42% in December 2012). 

The YouGov data provides third party data for what Nokia executives have been saying repeatedly in the last 18 months - that Windows Phone has driven an improvement in customer satisfaction. Nokia executives usually talk about the net promoter score, essentially a measure of how likely someone is to recommend a product, but also mention feedback from operators. 

It's clear that Windows Phone remains a long way behind iOS and Android in market share, but improving advocacy and loyalty for Nokia's Lumia devices is positive news for Windows Phone and an essential pre-condition for improved sales in 2013.

On the YouGov blog Russell Feldman, associate director at YouGive says:

“Nokia has finally turned a corner. By increasing the number of Lumias in its base it has given their customers something worth coming back to. It is now seen by its consumers as a quality smartphone brand. While they are still a fair distance behind Apple and Samsung in terms of market share and loyalty, the fact they have changed consumer perception among their customers puts them in a solid position as the smartphone war intensifies.”