I've spoken and written a lot in the past few years about social marketing and the principals underneath are pretty simple. Have a good product. Treat your customers well. Without those two solid foundations supporting your brand, it's extremely difficult to get traction. Here's a personal story of my experience with Apple and Verizon. It's pretty clear who will get my business and praise in the future.
I made the switch from my EVO to a Verizon iPhone 4 last week and it's the first Apple iPhone/iPod that I bought. It's also one of my first experiences at the Apple Store when I had a technical problem. My switch to Mac's had started at various startups a few years ago where a Macbook was standard issue. I got used to the ease of use in the Apple experience, since as I've gotten older, I became a fan of something I once said to a friend of mine regarding his 3 vehicles in various states of disrepair, "You know James, most of the time I just want to get from A to B, I don't really care how I get there, nor do I want to have to fix just one part to get there."
Rewind about 25 years, to my first experiences with electronics.
The first home computer that we had was and Apple IIe bought by my father in the late 80's. I remember making the turtle move with BASIC and the green screen but I can't say that I was very attached to the machine itself. By the time I was 15, I had fallen in with the technical crowd at school who were hacking their own PC's out of parts ordered from San Jose, California. California was a pretty exotic place to a bunch of teenagers from rural New York. My first major purchase at age 16, for $1008, was a cloned PC with 16 MB of RAM. It came in the mail from Silicon Valley and over the next few years I upgraded the memory, the graphics card, and the motherboard. We sneered derisively at the Mac fanboys (we only knew them from the online BBS's, there were none at my high school) who could not swap out cards, change their motherboard, or customize their machines.
By the time I was 18, I was immersed in Usenet newsgroups and local BBS's. Apple was still seen by me and everyone I respected as an operating system for the non-hardcore geek-wanna-be who couldn't get into the guts of their own machine. Apple fanboys were on par with AOL users, the latter were seen as the "end of the Internet as we knew it".
Fast forward to February 10th, 2011. I was going to go into a store to buy a Verizon iPhone. I was already immersed in the Apple experience, having bought my own Macbook about a year before and had won an iPad at a raffle. Owning the iPhone would be the final piece of the Apple experience. I wasn't sure how I felt about it, but Roving Screens needed all the test devices we could get our hands on and we also needed to make sure Mobimileage did not behave differently on a CDMA network.
The Best Buy employee transferred my data over from the HTC EVO 4G and got about 4000 entries. I know I don't have 4000 people's phone numbers in my phone but I wasn't sure how many I really had.
It turned out the high number of contacts is due to Google's crazy idea of what constitutes a phone contact. Here's how the Android OS handles contacts: it assume that anyone you've ever emailed from Gmail, every Twitter and Facebook friend is the same as a phone contact. (note to any Google engineers reading this: a phone contact is a lot more personal than someone I may or may not have emailed from Gmail, a Twitter follower, or a college friend who found me on Facebook) I ended up with quadruples of many contacts since if I have your phone number, it's likely that I've emailed you, follow you on Twitter, and we are friends on Facebook. We made some changes to the EVO's settings and he did the transfer again, eliminating the quadruples problem but I still had about 2000 entries. I wasn't sure if I had 2000 phone contacts but given that I had already been in the store for an hour, I did a quick spot check that everyone's information was in the new iPhone and left the store.
Two days later, as I'm searching through my phone, I realized that there were still duplicates. Worse, 1700 Twitter contacts were in the iPhone, basically as blank names with no other information. I was in downtown Palo Alto at the time and decided to visit the local Verizon store, since they were now going to be getting my $100+ per month instead of Sprint.
The girl at the counter took both my phones, the EVO and the iPhone. We unsync'd Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and tried to transfer just my phone contacts over. I waited for about half an hour while she tried the transfer a few different ways in the back- and at the end she handed back my phone with triplicate entries and 4000 contacts. She said that she couldn't help me and that they were helping me as a courtesy since I had not purchased the iPhone from their store. "We usually charge $20 for this transfer service. You'll just have to go through the (now 4000) entries and delete them on your own. I'm not sure if you can do this on your computer but if not you can go through them individually on your phone. Or maybe you can take it to the Apple Store and they can help you."
Wow. That was the worst customer service ever. Verizon's customer service rep's made the problem WORSE and walked away.
I walked the 3 blocks to the Apple Store and was approached by someone immediately after walking in. He asked why I came to the store today and I told him about my issues with transferring my contacts over. I didn't have an appointment but Peter Song, one of the Genius Bar employees said, "We should be able to figure this out." First he looked at the list of phones his Cellbright machine supported; it turned out the HTC EVO was not one of them. Next he tried the HTC sync to get just the phone contacts. His computer locked up. In between his other appointments, he came back to see if the next sync'ing system would get just the 400 phone contacts. No dice.
He then asked me, "Does this have an SD card in it?" and I said, "Yes, there's a micro-SD card that I've used to transfer photos." He transferred just the phone contacts on to the card, put the card into a reader, connected to the Mac, and transferred just the phone contacts on to the iPhone.
Five minutes later, I walked out with all of the data I wanted on my new phone and Apple gained another fanboy based on superior customer service.
If you're working on branding or marketing for a consumer facing company, here are the thoughts that I have, as a consumer:
- When my Verizon phone contract is up, would I hesitate for a nanosecond before jumping to whoever offers me a better deal? No.
- If Apple comes out with their next device, would I look and consider buying it? You bet.
If Apple just had good customer service that wouldn't have been enough to turn me into a fan but having a good product AND excellent customer service was.
On top of the amount I will spend on electronics in the future, think about the positive or negative advice I will give to family and friends when they ask me how I like Verizon or my new iPhone and how my story will influence their buying decisions. This is advertising and loyalty that money can't buy.
Follow me on Twitter: @chiah
