February24

Please, No Déjà Vu

I just returned from the Apple Store on the Plaza after picking up my computer! I'm excited to have it back... it's been nothing but final-unpacking and catch-up television this week. Now, instead of being lazy and pushing the fast-forward button, I can be lazy and surfing the web. WooHoo!

The Apple Technicians (wherever they are) diagnosed my computer with a bad Logic Board. While I'm not entirely sure what the Logic Board does, I find it odd that Apple iBooks have a problem with some of the ones in those machines. Could some bad Logic Boards have made their way into PowerBooks? I think it's possible.

I'm just happy to have my computer back now. The hard drive wasn't touched, so I don't have to re-install anything – shooooosh. Should be business as usual, except for the crashes. Fingers crossed (for luck, not for lying).

An Odd Note on Apple Branding

A year ago, the Apple brand was growing. This year, it's number one. There's no doubt that the iPodization of the world has done wonders for the brand, but Apple obviously knows how to market.

One of the things I learned in school, and have to keep reminding myself, is that you can't tell people how to think of a brand — in other words, the brand isn't what the company says it is, it's what the consumers say it is. I'm not sure how Apple made their brand so strong, but I think it has a lot to do with a very loyal consumer base (not to mention a superiority complex) and the fact that they extend their brand beyond television and print ads (ever seen the iPod boxes?).

Although Apple does a wonderful job in extending their brand virtually every where, the one place I think they (and many other companies) fail is on the phone.

Before I went to the Apple Store today, I decided to call and make sure that my personal data was put back on the machine. I called the phone number and was instantly dumped into a recorded message (press one for this, press two for that, etc.). Every option that was given to me was stated in this way:

To talk to someone about _________, press ___.

Simple enough... or so I thought. I had to hang up twice and listened to the options three times before I finally figured out how to get a hold of a real person. See, when they said "talk to someone" they really meant "listen to another recording."

For some of the options they were giving, that was okay – checking the status of a repair number, store hours, etc. – but I needed to actually TALK to someone, a human, and it took me three times to get there.

Not that three times is too many, okay, well, yeah it is. But the fact is, for a company that is number one in world-wide brand recognition, a company that is known for breaking boundaries when it comes to ease-of-use and simplicity, then why was it so difficult to talk to one person on the phone for literally 20 seconds? Guess maybe they're not number one in the world for customer service.

+ original post date: February 24, 2005 02:07 PM
+ categories: Computers