A Great Lesson In Customer Service From Apple…As In Not What To Do.
If your familiar with the I Phone or I Pod Touch then you’ll know what I am talking about. On Friday July 11th Apple rolled out a new I Phone and a software upgrade for all I Phones and I Pod Touches. Problem is nothing worked. There were worms in the Apple. Customers waited for hours only to be told to go home to activate their phones. When they got home it wouldn’t work either. Worse yet many customers who tried to upgrade the software had their phones turned into bricks…non functioning except to dial 911 calls. But that wasn’t their biggest mistake….
Reading through the endless postings on blogs and the forum on Apples own site the biggest mistake was not saying anything to their customers about the mess. People are upset about the meltdown but are livid about the lack of communication. An excerpt from a posting on the Apple forum says it best:
“Apple hyped this release up big time. And they let the majority of users down. And they remain silent? Not a single press release, blog posting, video announcement saying, “We KNOW. We KNOW. We’re sorry, we’re working on it. We promise it’ll be working as soon as we can get it to work.”
he went on to add:
“A promise they made that could be made right by a simple “sorry.”
I have to agree. I have an I Pod Touch. When the software upgrade wouldn’t go through I went to Apple’s site looking for an explanation. Nothing..nada…zip. On their site they are advertising the new phones and all the apps and you can buy all their computers but not one mention of the meltdown going on worldwide. Not a good PR move. If I saw a pop-up on their site that said “Click here for software upgrade information” with a small explanation of the problem I would probably turn off the computer and try again tomorrow. I’d sympathize with them instead of being annoyed.
It’s a priceless lesson for business’s and we should all take notice. Here at Hanks Clothing we make mistakes with the best of them but move fast to make them right on the few occasions they do occur. 99% of the time when people know you are working on resolving the issue and you give good communication they are more than patient. It’s an easy fix and Apple has surprised me by dropping the ball like this. It would take less than 5 minutes to implement a statement. I think that geeky Mac guy is going to have to stop picking on the Vista man.
