A Lesson In Brand Experience Management
September 16th, 2009
In my previous post on third-party vendors can hurt your brand. The experience of a failed Mac Book Pro screen lead to discovering a gaping void in the Apple – Third Party Vendor work-flow process. An experience I expected to be seamless and an extension of the Apple Customer Care experience. In an ideal computing environment when every script is mapped to an exact correlation between nodes my expectation is attainable. Yet when there is human interaction and a variable of scenarios, there is bound to be areas for improvement. Note, I say improvement – not error. On a customer’s perspective, when you do care for a brand, be part of the solution don’t just be part of the problem.
After voicing my concerns with Apple and the Mac Support Store on separate occasions, my plight was quickly resolved. Another customer perspective: anger and frustration when bringing in a complaint to your brand won’t get you anywhere. Master the art of complaining and you’ll get more than what you asked for without trying too hard.
Apple responded quickly by replacing and upgrading my Mac Book Pro, while the Mac Support Store sincerely apologized for depending on the reseller and third-party guidelines without examining what would be a better experience for me, their manufacturer’s customer and their customer. They failed to ask the question “how can the Mac Support Store” live to its mission while upholding the brand experience standards of the manufacturer they represent?
If I were Apple what steps would I look into to ensure that the Apple Customer Care experience extends to the Apple Reseller Experience? Here are my recommendations:
- Review their reseller work-flow process. An obvious breakdown between the reseller and the Mac Depot.
- Put in place a Reseller Customer Service Compliance Standard
- Require reseller training. Apple should charge for this in my opinion, make it part of the reseller agreement.
- Quarterly check-ins
- Random customer polls serviced by resellers
- Reseller performance review
- Non-reseller compliance should lead to points deducted from a reseller’s performance. Once a threshold is reached that contract should be cancelled. Gives a reseller incentive to truly focus on meeting the Customer Compliance Standard.
Sounds very cut-throat and restrictive for resellers, but if I were a brand like Apple I would do everything in my power to ensure that proper brand management at every possible customer contact point is available. After all, I AM Apple.
How are you managing your brand’s customer experience?
~ jessica valenzuela
Tags: Apple, Brand, customer experience, Mac Support Store
