My fiancee and I bought an AppleTV for her father, my father-in-law, last father’s day. Unfortunately the AppleTV dropped dead in under a year and the first replacement we received was DOA. While the AppleTV is a great device, in concept, it does have some issues, though I’d still recommend it. But this is not the first issue that we’ve had with AppleTV’s. We have two in our house and have had issues with one of them. Thankfully Apple has always been very good about standing by their product and this time I had a remarkably good experience with a guy named John.
He was essentially everything you want in customer service. He was nice, and well spoken and from the outset made sure that I knew I was going to be taken care of. I did have to spend 10-15 minutes on hold to get to this guy but in spite of that, once I got there, any frustration caused by listening to all that muzak was quickly resolved by the attention and understanding he paid to me. John assured me that even though I was outside of the warranty by a few days that I would be taken care of. This is extremely uncommon in a world of “that’s our policy, sir.” It is refreshing to not have to deal with the frustration of going to someone’s supervisor, all the while suppressing the rage building up by dealing with the customer service process. John handled me like you would handle a family member calling you to ask for a favor, i.e doing whatever you can do to help.
John also acknowledged me, at one point he even remarked something to the effect that he was appreciative that he still has a job in this job market and it was because of loyal customers like me that he could have his job. I felt valued by the company by way of it’s representative, John.
Appreciation, acknowledgement and the guarantee that I will be taken care of are the components of great customer service ensuring customer satisfaction. Apple has generally been easy to deal with but my most recent experience was noteworthy.
In a world of automated systems and customer service people with an attitude looking to get by doing the bare minimum that is required of them, it is really nice to get someone who sounds like they’re smiling and they appreciate you as a customer.
This all interests me because the company I work for, Gap International recently released a Customer Alignment Diagnostic focused on determining the quality of customer service by polling the employees, rather than the customers directly. Though at first this method seems counter intuitive, in this instance I can easily see the validation in this method.