Sporadic
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I had a bad experience on the phone last weekend with a new Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Apple store called MacAuthority. I shared my experience with several folks personally and online. One of my friends knows some of the people associated with the store and encouraged me to pay them a visit.
The short version? The store is awesome. I talked with their key staff about my experience on the phone and they assured me that was not the norm. We talked for quite a while and they demonstrated not only a deep knowledge of Apple and its products based on years of experience, but a strong desire to support their customers in Chattanooga.
Going to MacAuthority is a lot like visiting an “official” Apple Store with the laid back feel of a store with deep Southern roots. They have three locations in the Southeast in Nashville, Tenn., Atlanta, Ga., and now in Chattanooga. I highly recommend them.
I don’t have to drive to Atlanta any more and I can truly be happy about that because I know the service just up the road in Chattanooga is going to be outstanding!
By the way, I’m writing this post with the assistance of a new Magic Mouse, which I also recommend. I’ve never spent much on a supplemental mouse; I’ve always stuck with what came with the computer or bought a third party mouse for $20 or less. Loving it!
Seth Godin’s blog is one that I check at least daily and you should too. This post dovetails into my discussion about customer service I posted last weekend.
Here’s an excerpt. Click through for the brief article:
Few businesses understand (really understand) just how much a customer is worth. Add to this the additional profit you get from a delighted customer spreading the word–it can easily double or triple the lifetime value.
(Via Seth’s Blog.)
Seriously. Tag this guy into your newsreader. Inspiring, empowering stuff.
As a dedicated lexivore (a word I just minted to mean “a devourer of words”), I wanted to share the texture this delicious lexicological tidbit:
ca⋅coph⋅o⋅ny /kəˈkɒfəni/ –noun, plural -nies.
1. harsh discordance of sound; dissonance: a cacophony of hoots, cackles, and wails.
2. a discordant and meaningless mixture of sounds: the cacophony produced by city traffic at midday.
3. Music. frequent use of discords of a harshness and relationship difficult to understand.
courtesy of dictionary.com
While all of these are fine definitions I want to focus your attention on the middle of the three, “a discordant and meaningless mixture of sounds,” which is what usually greets me at the door each day. I think I was able to break down and analyze the sources of today’s particular cacophonous flavor:
- Waves of the 1980s waft through the air from Jordan’s room. Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” is one of his favorite tunes, so much so that on one recent night that is the song he slept to, on repeat, all night. It was still playing in the morning when we woke him up to a new dawn.
- Meagan took her perch at Julie’s iMac in the office, where she like to record herself singing very loud. You know how people are taught to sing to the back of the room from the stage? I think she’s trying to sing to the beginning time. I fear retribution?Einstein style?if the power of her raging uvula manages to reach back that far.
- Katheryn spent much of the evening reading a book to herself. Out loud to herself. The key word in that sentence is loud.
In fact, I think that is our theme.
As individuals the children’s actions, while louder than most, can be acceptable. Together, they make?you guessed it?Cacophony.
Ah, life with children. Click through for a poignant post about the havoc a child can wreak in just a few short moments…
defective yeti — Eighth Wonder:
I glanced up from my laptop to find my five-year-old son standing nearby, gripping a bottle of Elmer’s glue. He had removed the cap and was holding the container upside down, watching, fascinated, as the white viscous substance drooled into a ever-growing pool on the kitchen floor.“What are you doing?!” I barked. “Put that down!”
(Via Defective Yeti.)
I really need to read some more Vonnegut. This is a post on Mark Malazarte’s blog about Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to his father after the famous author sold his first story to Collier’s Magazine.
The quote is from Malazarte. Click through to read Vonnegut’s amazing letter.
I’m a pretty huge quote/passage nerd and I definitely need this printed and hung up on my wall. It’s been a few months since I quit and yea I do miss having a steady paycheck and not stressing out about paying next month’s rent (or the current month), but I mean ultimately you just have to do it if you’re really committed to your craft be it writing/design/filmmaking/acting/whatever creative venture you see yourself a part of.
(Via Waxin and Milkin.)
Customer service is what keeps me coming back. Sure, product quality and branding and image are important to companies, but it’s the customer service that’s going to keep me coming back. Here are a few of my experiences:
I love chicken and so do a lot of other people. Just about every fast food restaurant serves chicken in some capacity, but Chick-fil-A sells a chicken experience.
Think about the bored employees that take your order at most fast food restaurants. They look at you like you’re the only thing between them and their next smoke break.
Now, think about your visits to Chick-fil-A (if you’ve been lucky enough to eat there). Have you ever seen an upset employee? I haven’t. In fact, they’re employees treat you like their business depends on it and it does.
Staff members will walk around the room offering to refill your drinks or take your trash if you’re finished eating. They treat their customers as if they are dining at a fine restaurant, and that crafts the customer experience.
Simply amazing customer service!
Beautiful iPhone cases
When my wife and I upgraded our iPhones from 3G to 3GS, we gifted our former phones to our daughters. With four phones that look almost identical, we bought cases in four colors to go with them. We all loved the look of iFrogz cases and chose to buy from that company.
At $30 a pop, we dropped $120 on cases. Everybody loved them until they started breaking. They had these little tabs on the side to keep the two halves of the case steady on the iPhone, but the plastic tabs started snapping off.
We were frustrated and I sent an e-mail to the company. I wasn’t rude or pushy or angry. I just told them we loved the look and feel of their product and were disappointed that they broke in less than a month of careful use. I didn’t ask for anything and just wanted to let them know how we felt.
It wasn’t long before I received an e-mail from iFrogz apologizing for our experience. They asked for our mailing address and the exact type of case we purchased so they could ship replacements to us; free replacements & free shipping for us, free great reviews about an awesome company from me to everyone who will listen.
Simply amazing customer service!
The Mothership. All hail Apple!
And Apple. Wow! They turned the computer industry on its head by focusing on designing amazing products and treating customers like they might actually be important. I’ve got a long list of great stories about my experiences with Apple. I’m just going to bullet a couple of them
- Failed hard drive in a white MacBook: still under warranty, free replacement at Apple Store while I waited.
- Failed hard drive in another white MacBook: also still under warranty, free replacement at Apple Store while I waited—again.
- Cracked iPhone 3G case (on the back at the bottom near the charger): under extended AppleCare warranty, free replacement phone at the Apple Store
- Cracked wrist rest on a white MacBook: took it to the Apple Store where they identified it as a known problem; replaced free while I waited
- Shattered iPhone 3GS: Not free this time, but they knocked 15% off the usual replacement price; repaired while I waited
Simply amazing customer service!
In summary:
These are several of my stories about the high level of customer service offered by come companies I enjoy doing business with. Sometimes it appears a company may lose a few bucks, but it’s not a loss. It’s an investment. Let’s look at my experience with Apple for a moment.
They gave me two hard drives, an iPhone 3G replacement, a top case for a MacBook, a discounted iPhone screen replacement and some labor. We’ll be generous and say that’s an investment of $1,000 on their part.
During that time, I’ve purchased two desktop computers, three iPods, four iPhones, and five laptops excluding the one I bought at work. I’ve spent…gosh, this is a little embarrassing to add up. At an average cost of about $150 an iPod, $300 an iPhone, $1,200 a laptop and $2,000 per desktop, I’ve spent somewhere around $12,000 on Apple’s products.
That’s a net gain of $11,000 for Apple, and I’ll continue giving them my money for the rest of my life thanks to the amazing customer service they’ve provided over the years and that I fully expect they will continue to provide, because they put their customers first.
I talked briefly last night about my extremely wise decision to buy MarsEdit. Within three hours of posting, I garnered a comment of thanks Daniel Jalkut, founder of the company Red Sweater Software that publishes MarsEdit.
I strolled over to check out his company blog and found a recent post that dovetails into my thoughts about Mac indie developers. Here’s a taste, but you should definitely click over to read the rest of the article if it tickles your fancy:
Red Sweater Blog – And The Awarding Goes To:
October 26th, 2009
What distinguishes developers on the Mac from those who design for other platforms such as Windows and Linux? We often answer the question with a flip response that makes us feel good about ourselves:
- Mac developers are perfectionists.
- Mac developers are community-oriented.
- Mac developers are not obsessed with the bottom line.
- Mac developers are passionate.
But admit it: these characteristics are common to developers on all platforms. So why do Mac developers consistently produce the most refined, friendly, user-empowering, beautiful software on the planet? (My opinion only! You’re welcome to yours). I believe that excellence is achieved by these passionate, community-oriented perfectionists who are not obsessed with the bottom line, and that the Mac ecosystem supports these four characteristics in a more balanced manner than any other platform.
(Via Red Sweater Software’s blog.)
I took a plunge today and bought the Mac blogging editor MarsEdit. It’s an application I’ve been looking at for years, but couldn’t rationalize paying money for a blog that earns no revenue. It’s just one of those beautiful applications the Mac is known for enticing out of developers and it integrates with my longtime newsreader NetNewsWire.
I took another look at MarsEdit recently and fell in love with its Flickr integration. You pull up your Flickr feed in a media browser and it’s like all of my photos are stored locally. It pulls that cloud we’re all working in a little closer to earth and makes adding and working with photos on my blog drop dead simple.
Our family's family of Apple products
I have been using Macs exclusively for years and independent developers are one of the reasons I will never be able to work comfortably on a Windows machine. Mac developers don’t just write software to check it off their list or purely for functionality. Much of the indie software available for the Mac focuses on performing one task insanely well and doing it with beauty.
That’s one reason I invested in MarsEdit and why I’ll proudly be flying a MarsEdit badge on any blog I publish. If you’re on a Mac, I strongly encourage you to support developers like the super folks at Red Sweater Software.
For budding AppleScripters out there Red Sweater also produces FastScripts, which is definitely worth a look along with some other great stuff.
I’m back from a work-related conference. It was a wonderful learning experience and I’m exhausted. My conference registration included my choice of several books. I picked “Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys To Creativity,” which was especially sweet since I put that on my Amazon wish list a month or two ago.
If there is one thing I learned from the conference and from the book (so far, I’m halfway through it), it’s that I need to quit wasting so much time and get some work done. Nothing new there, but it’s nice to rekindle the fires every now and then. This annual conference strikes a match for me every year and I’m already looking forward to next year.
I’ll tell you one thing I need to do a better job of; recording the little things. Not just photos and videos (although I need to do more of that too) but little tiny bits of insight. I have a iPhone that lets me do, well, just about everything. I have no excuse.
I need to spend more time reading (books) and writing in my own words…for me me me.
Subtitle: Why do I remember Julian Sands?
So, I’m sitting in the living room some time around 10:30 on a Thursday night watching Castle on TiVo. This random guy pops up on the screen as one of the characters.
I squinted my eyes and thought for a moment.
“Isn’t that the guy that was in that movie Warlock?” I asked Julie.
“Yep, I think it is,” she said.
“Julian Sands. That’s his name, right?”
“Yep, I think so,” she said.
An innocent conversation, except I haven’t seen the movie Warlock in years. To give you a baseline, New World Pictures release Warlock in 1989. I was a junior in high school! This guy flits up on the screen for a few seconds and I can suddenly remember those details—the movie, a name.
Sands also starred in Boxing Helena, which costarred Sherilyn Fenn. Why do I remember this? Why haven’t I been on Jeopardy on something? Why doesn’t my brain work right?!
If this kind of pop culture drivel can bubble up at weird times, why not math genius or fluency in multiple languages? Why can my brain retain such worthless mental detritus but I struggle with algebra?!
I’m vexed, but I’ll probably kick your ass at Trivial Pursuit.
Note: Sorry for the random tour of Google Images, IMDB, and Wikipedia. I couldn’t settle on one source. Viva la Internet!
Second noteIs it just me, or does Julian Sands look a little like Rod Stewart with a little less rock and roll and a little more Burt Bacharach?
