The Power of Customer Experiences

I've written widely on the importance of the total customer experience on this blog, in a book on the subject, and elsewhere. However, it is so rare that you experience excellence in this space that when you do, it is worth writing about and celebrating.

I've been experiencing an intermittent problem with my iPhone. It occasionally dies necessitating a hard reboot or it cycles through a reboot cycle automatically. I took it to Apple about a month ago and the woman working at the Genius Bar thought it might have been due to the fact that I had so many apps running in the background taking up RAM. You may recall my post here talking about the problem with the multitasking user model which leads to this situation. She suggested I cancel running apps every once in a while and if that didn't help, to try restoring the system. I've been canceling apps regularly but still had the rebooting problem. I therefore tried the restore suggestion but that didn't help either.

That led me to take the iPhone back to the Apple store. The place was packed and had long lines to purchase stuff and to visit the Genius Bar. Luckily, I had reserved a time online for the Genius Bar.

The Genius Bar itself was being fully used so the Apple staff member helped me right in the line. I told him my story, he checked the record of my last visit, and promptly told me that he didn't want me to have to waste more of my time possibly having to come back again so they would just give me a brand new phone. Just like that! It only took a few minutes and I was out of the store. I haven't had any problems whatsoever with the phone after that.

Pretty impressive customer service in my view. I should also point out that customers in the Genius Bar line had a unique perspective on the problems that they were having. To a person they pointed out that they loved Apple despite whatever problem they had with a particular product. Experiences like the one I had engender such loyalty in customers that they'll forgive the company for the occasional problem they experience with their products. Now that's a pretty good position to get into as a company.

A New User Experience Bar for OSs

Much of the discussion regarding the user experience improvements with modern SmartPhones and tablets focuses on the touch interaction with and graphically rich rendering of the user interface. I've also pointed out here the dramatic improvement in installing applications on these devices, typically with a single click on one button. All of these are of course significant improvements. However, I just experienced another phenomenal improvement in these devices (at least those built by Apple) with regard to restoring the system. I was recently advised by Apple to restore my iPhone. It sounded to me like the advice I often hear on tech podcasts and also from PC company support staff. I dreaded having to backup all the data then reinstall the operating system and then reinstall all the apps, copying back the data, changing back settings/passwords, etc.

I pressed the "Restore" button on iTunes to restore my iPhone and waited. After it was done and I looked at my iPhone, I was absolutely shocked. Everything was back to normal, all apps, all data, all settings, all preferences, everything! I was delighted. I think this is the new user experience bar for restoring all operating systems. This is how it should be done everywhere. Period.