Apple has been getting a lot of press lately, both good and bad. With every good comment or article about their products, both hardware and software, there’s a bad comment or article about an ethical or moral stance Apple puportedly has. I see articles with complaints like (and this is all paraphrase, folks!) “Apple’s FairPlay DRM is evil!” (from eff.org) or “Apple’s products need to be more green-conscious!” (from Greenpeace.org). I have my own thoughts on these matters, but I’ll save them for another soon-to-be-posted article.
I think, speaking from experience as well as other articles I’ve seen, that Apple is one of the very best at customer service. I work in retail, and I know that the retail rule-of-thumb in service is “The customer is always right”; I also know that phrase is sheer bullcrap! However, you do what you can, within reason, to give the customer a wide latitude and ensure their continued patronage, and Apple certainly does this. The perfect example happened recently when actor and writer Wil Wheaton (remember ST:TNG’s Wesley Crusher, the annoying know-it-all teen?!) wrote in his “In Exile” blog about Apple’s customer service concerning his iTMS purchases. Just click that last line and read up.
I’ll say from my personal experience, in getting the iMac G5 that I’m currently typing this out on fixed, that it was a small hassle having to drag the whole computer in last year to a nearby Apple store to be repaired. You can read my blog entry on the burning incident here. They could have just sent me the part that I needed, since I told them I had opened the computer and diagnosed the part in question, but they insisted that their techs look it over to see if anything else needed to be replaced (in other words, they wanted to see if I screwed it up myself, thus nullifying any warranty!). After all was said and done, the diagnosics and repairs cost me nothing aside from a weekend without my trusty iMac. I have no reason to complain about something done for free!
Now I’m turning it over to all (?) my readers… Do you have any examples of awesome customer service? It can be any business, not just Apple. Like I said, I work in retail so this subject hits home for me in both my job and as a consumer too.
Speak up, and cheers!
Tags: Apple, service, Wil Wheaton
Here’s my small customer service story…
My first mac was a 12 in. 867mhz powerbook g4. A month before warranty going out, I decided to take it in @ the genius bar. The reason? The display hinge made a very loud cracking noise when you would move the display. The genius told me that it was a normal thing, with normal use the mechanism within the hinge will stiffen up a bit, hence the cracking sound. More than likely , Apple would not pay attention to it and send it back to me untouched. Taking my chances, I decided to send it for repair, and left it at the Genius bar. Couple of days later, I checked the status online and they said they couldn’t reproduce “the fault” and it was been sent back to me via DHL.
Now this was the DHL around the time it was recently acquired by the shady Airborne Express. Long story short, DHL “lost” my powerbook, and thats when Apple got involved. I spoke with a guy, that took care of things like this and he spoke with DHL directly. After DHL confessed their screw up, Apple went right ahead and sent me the, back then current model 12 in. a spiffy 1.33 Ghz with 768 Ram and a 64Mb vid card. To say the least I was more than pleased with Apple, not just because of the replacement, but because even the low-level employee took interest in my powerbook-dilemma and the poor girl called DHL several times, called me with updates, and then eventually sent me to the guy “up” in the ladder of power, and he took care of things, and when it was deemed as “lost” I got sent a replacement.