While traditional retailers are struggling to match their online rivals in providing positive shopping experiences (a trend that IBM says will be reversed in the next five years,) some big name enterprise vendors are already dominating customer satisfaction rankings. The latest survey from Technology Business Research, a New Hampshire-based market analysis firm, found that Dell achieved an important end-user happiness triumph in the third quarter.

The newly private hardware maker surpassed Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo with the top mean satisfaction score in the enterprise desktop market across all but two criteria: management capabilities and social media support. The vendor was tied with HP for the number one spot in the x86 server space, but a larger percentage of customers gave it an “extremely satisfied” rating.

Dell maintained the highest brand loyalty rate, with 83 percent of users planning to make another purchase and 80 percent likely to make a recommendation, but Meg Whitman’s company came out ahead in notebook customer satisfaction. HP also snagged the top spot in PC services and support, while IBM reached the same rank over in the server industry by merit of having the best on-site response time, replacement parts availability, and ongoing services and maintenance, according to TBR. The firm believes that these features are the biggest determining factors in purchasing behavior “across all platforms.”

“Customers are loyal to PC and server vendors that continually exceed expectations for reliable, high-performing systems with a series of services that help keep their IT environments up and running,” Greg Richardson, a senior analyst at TBR, noted in a statement. “PCs and x86 servers continue to be the backbone of major IT infrastructure, and customers rely on these systems to support their broader IT goals.”