customer service
Apr. 7th, 2002 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mangosteenI have a Apple iBook. I think it's a wonderful piece of machinery. The operating system is pretty nifty, too. A few months ago, the latch that held the cover closed, broke. In addition, a few weeks ago, the hard drive started making little chittering noises that usually translate as "I'm slowly grinding my bearings into a fine powder, and there's nothing you can do about it! BWAHAHAHAHA!!"
Fortunately, it was under warranty, so I brought it to the local Apple Store, where they took it, poked it, prodded it, slapped a tag on it, and set it off to the mothership for warranty repair. That was Tuesday night. I received a call on Friday morning, saying that it was repaired, and that I could pick it up. After doing the math, I was appropriately impressed with the turn-around. I went there Friday evening to pick it up, and it appeared that the replacement HD was sent without the appropriate OS software loaded on it. Without hesitation, they tried to make everything right while I waited, found they couldn't, and I received a call later that night saying that everything was working now, they even loaded all the updates on, and that I could pick it up first thing Saturday morning. I picked it up, everything Just Worked, and life was good.
But that's not what I came here to talk to you about.
I got the iBook because after 13 years of laptops being a popular consumer gadget, somebody finally made one I could live with. I also bought one because Apple was the only company I haven't heard horror stories about regarding customer service. When I walked into an Apple Store for the first time, it seemed like a cross between a Vidal Sasoon hair salon (although that might just have been the stark black-and-whiteness of it), and a luxury car dealership (because of the way they display their machines). The luxury car dealership analogy appears to go a bit deeper though. They knew I cared about my computer being functional, and they seemed to care about it, too. They took the extra time to make sure it was fully functional before they handed it back to me. At some basic level, they understood that the customer relationship doesn't end when the sale is booked. You just don't typically see that nowadays.
I know that the reason for this is that while the technical people who work at the Apple Store are probably True Believers themselves, they are also paid enough to care. They care about the job, and they care about the Apple user experience. A pretty powerful combination, that.
Observation: Between lowering an entire population's expectations of customer service, and paying a high enough wage for people to care about the job they do, we have chosen the former. It's only effective to choose the former if you have a large and complex media organ capable of manipulating public opinion on a massive scale. As it turns out though, the US has one of those.
Fortunately, it was under warranty, so I brought it to the local Apple Store, where they took it, poked it, prodded it, slapped a tag on it, and set it off to the mothership for warranty repair. That was Tuesday night. I received a call on Friday morning, saying that it was repaired, and that I could pick it up. After doing the math, I was appropriately impressed with the turn-around. I went there Friday evening to pick it up, and it appeared that the replacement HD was sent without the appropriate OS software loaded on it. Without hesitation, they tried to make everything right while I waited, found they couldn't, and I received a call later that night saying that everything was working now, they even loaded all the updates on, and that I could pick it up first thing Saturday morning. I picked it up, everything Just Worked, and life was good.
But that's not what I came here to talk to you about.
I got the iBook because after 13 years of laptops being a popular consumer gadget, somebody finally made one I could live with. I also bought one because Apple was the only company I haven't heard horror stories about regarding customer service. When I walked into an Apple Store for the first time, it seemed like a cross between a Vidal Sasoon hair salon (although that might just have been the stark black-and-whiteness of it), and a luxury car dealership (because of the way they display their machines). The luxury car dealership analogy appears to go a bit deeper though. They knew I cared about my computer being functional, and they seemed to care about it, too. They took the extra time to make sure it was fully functional before they handed it back to me. At some basic level, they understood that the customer relationship doesn't end when the sale is booked. You just don't typically see that nowadays.
I know that the reason for this is that while the technical people who work at the Apple Store are probably True Believers themselves, they are also paid enough to care. They care about the job, and they care about the Apple user experience. A pretty powerful combination, that.
Observation: Between lowering an entire population's expectations of customer service, and paying a high enough wage for people to care about the job they do, we have chosen the former. It's only effective to choose the former if you have a large and complex media organ capable of manipulating public opinion on a massive scale. As it turns out though, the US has one of those.
