As a serious world traveler, I always carry some sort of headset. Back in the day, it was earphones for the Sony Walkman; now it's Apple's AirPods.

Recently, my firm Creative Strategies ran a follow up to the voice assistant research study we published last year. We again partnered with Experian but added Apple's AirPods to the study since Siri integration is one of their key features. We used every available resource to track down as many AirPod owners as we could and found 942 people willing to share their thoughts on Apple's latest product.

Customer Satisfaction

The big story is high customer satisfaction; 98 percent of AirPod owners are very satisfied or satisfied, with 82 percent very satisfied. This sets the record for the highest level of satisfaction for a new product from Apple; the original iPhone and iPad each had a 92 percent satisfaction ratings when they arrived; Apple Watch in 2015 had 97 percent.

While the overall satisfaction number is remarkable, a second question we asked of these owners stood out even more. We used a standard benchmark question called a Net Promoter Score, which ranks a consumer's willingness to recommend the product to others. This ranking is on a scale of 0 to 10 with 10 being extremely likely to recommend and 0 being not likely at all to recommend.

Apple's Net Promoter Score for AirPods came back as 75. To put that into context, the iPhone's NPS number is 72. Product and NPS specialists will tell you anything above 50 is excellent and anything above 70 is world class. According to Survey Monkey's Global Benchmark of over 105,000 organizations that have tested their NPS, the average is an NPS of 39.

This incredibly high Net Promoter Score intrigued me for another reason. We know from profiling questions that most Apple AirPod owners fall into the early adopter category and early adopters don't usually give products high recommendations. The first few studies we did on Apple Watch had a lower NPS, as did the Amazon Echo and Google Home. AirPods broke the mold here, as even the harshest critics felt AirPods are ready for the mainstream.

We asked respondents to briefly explain their ranking and an analysis of the most frequently used words by respondents were: Fit, Magic, Sound Quality, Convenient, Love, Good Sound, and Battery Life.

General themes in the write-in section were also quite telling. Folks raved about the iPhone pairing process and many were surprised by how well they worked citing bad experiences with prior Bluetooth headphones. First timers were also impressed by how convenient and useful wireless headphones are, while others said they liked the AirPods even more than they thought they would.

While there was some negativity in the write-in section, it was mostly around concerns or issues with fit or connectivity problems. But these were certainly an extreme minority.

Feature Satisfaction

We also looked at customer satisfaction around certain features. The number that stood out most is comfort and secure fit. There was a great deal of debate about AirPods when they first came out that not having a cable means it will make them not stay in or people will lose them easily if they fall out. We can now dispel that myth as Apple has designed a product that fits most people's ears and, more importantly, fits securely and does not fall out for the vast majority of owners. Only 4.6 percent of AirPod owners who participated in the study said they were dissatisfied with the fit and ability to fit snugly.

Consumer Sentiment for AirPods

Lastly, for the AirPods part of our study, we added some general sentiment questions to see what kinds of feelings or emotions consumers agreed/did not agree with regarding AirPods. A couple of standout answers are worth mentioning.

84 percent of respondents strongly or somewhat agree that using just one AirPod at a time makes sense in certain situations . This is not necessarily a new behavior if we reflect back to the Bluetooth earpiece days for making calls, but certainly an additional value proposition to Bluetooth headphones as a category.

88.97 percent of respondents strongly or somewhat agree AirPods consistently pair to their iPhone as soon as they put one in their ear . While Bluetooth reliability has come a long way, we know many Bluetooth headsets on the market do struggle with pairing consistently quite often. This data point suggests instant pairing reliability of AirPods is quite high.

82.5 percent of consumers would like more control over their content by tapping the AirPods to do things like turn volume up or down or skip to next song . Right now that can be done manually or by asking Siri to turn the volume up or down or skip to next song, but it appears some way to have more control of media by touching or tapping the AirPods themselves is desirable.

82 percent of respondents strongly or somewhat agree AirPods are their favorite Apple products launched in recent memory . What makes this question interesting is the fact that, while our respondents mainly lean to early tech adoption, we do not have a massive group of hardcore Apple fanatics. Knowing that makes this question all the more interesting. Overall, our respondents feel Apple has released one of the best products in a long time.

62 percent of respondents strongly or somewhat agree AirPods are causing them to consume more audio content (music, books, podcast, etc) than before they owned AirPods. This is fascinating as it could indicate AirPods becoming a catalyst for more of Apple or third-party services.

Lastly, we wanted to see how much our participants in the study still defaulted to old habits or didn't trust AirPods enough to completely go wireless and fully ditch their wired headphones. To our surprise, 64 percent of consumers somewhat disagree or strongly disagree they keep wired headphones handy just in case AirPods don't work.