Category Archives: Customer Experience

CONTROL: Apple’s Secret to Delivering a Consistently Good Retail Experience

photo: apple.com

The short lesson from this article about Apple’s retail experience is that if you want people to have a consistently good experience with your store, you must CONTROL everything. No element of your store’s experience should be left up to a random element of choice as decided by an hourly employee.

A 2007 employee training manual lays out the A-P-P-L-E “steps of service” with an acronym of the company name: “Approach customers with a personalized warm welcome,” “Probe politely to understand all the customer’s needs,” “Present a solution for the customer to take home today,” “Listen for and resolve any issues or concerns,” and “End with a fond farewell and an invitation to return.” It is reportedly still in use today.

Freedom comes on the other side of control. How are you controlling the experience in your store?

 

Customer Experience at Virgin’s New Club

When you’re sitting at the gate, and they announce a 20-minute delay for your flight, you can feel the frustration in the air.

When you’re sitting in a domestic airline club and you get a 20-minute delay, you think, “well…at least I’m not at the gate yet. Maybe I’ll have another pretzel.”

When they announced a 20-minute delay at Virgin’s new club in New York’s JFK, people applauded. Why? Because they got to extend their stay in the club by 20 minutes.

Salon? check. Spa? check. Pool table? check. Cheap crackers and plastic-wrapped cheese? Try United.

Capture this attitude toward making your customers happy and you’ll be hauling money to the bank like Sir Richard Branson.

[photo from Slade Architecture]

Shareworthy Customer Service – Tim Miles wrote the book

Click on the thumb and go buy the book!

Seriously, Tim wrote the book on shareworthy customer service.

The book is called “Your Customers Like This – The whats, whos, hows & whys of Shareworthy Customer Service.”

It’s pretty awesome and right now, it’s pretty inexpensive. In fact, Tim is only asking a donation of 99-cents to benefit Touchpoints Central Missouri Autism Project.

You should grab it before he changes his mind. Did I say it’s awesome? Yes. Yes, I did.