Apple is losing its edge in delivering a good customer experience at Apple Stores

Last weekend I was at the Apple Store in Väla centrum, in my home town of Helsingborg in Southern Sweden with 3 kids all wanting to buy apple products.  My previous experience at the Apple Store when they just opened was chaotic, store employees that are chatting with each other instead of helping customers and payment systems that does not work. OK that was the opening day, I can cut Apple some slack with the 20 minute wait. Apple Stores used to be the model of very good customer experiences but now I have that questioned… even the Phone House store on the same shopping complex now offer a better experience.

Back to last weekend… getting into the store the first thing kids did  is go after the iPads on display and starts exploring. Great.. Two kids less to manage… but my daughter who is desperate to buy a replacement iPhone charger is very desperate so she went around the entire shop looking for the right item. I quietly observed a  few feet away. No Apple Store personnel approached her or greeted her, or not even me… we seem to be invisible to so many Apple store employees as usual chatting to each other and busy looking down their own iPads.

10 minutes later my daughter found the items she wanted and looking around for someone to help.. I did the same, had eye contact with 4 employees in the Store but all immediately avoided my gaze.. Is there something wrong with trying to buy something? Another 10 minutes later we were still waiting, clearly frustrated  I went to approach an employee who is fiddling with his iPad, and saw he is playing a game.. A Game while working on a Apple Store! Are they all playing games on their iPads now instead of attending to customers? Is that the new Apple mantra? After another 10 minutes of coaxing an Apple Store employee about paying for the item we were finally out of the shop… In total I wasted 45 minutes in an Apple Store just to buy an iPhone charger…  Well Apple missed potential sales of 2 iPhone 5S and an iPad Air with the other 2 kids since we did not want to wait longer for Apple Store employees to provide any form of service.

With this bad experience on the same Apple Store I can only say that Apple is now on a death spiral. They lost their edge, they lost their customer experience edge. I will go back to that store in a few weeks just to check and verify how bad is Apple's customer service spiraling down… If it's an isolated incident on this particular Apple Store then Apple better put its act together on this store since they are losing customer. Last  weekend Väla was busy but Apple Store is empty.. Something that never happens in other Apple Stores I have seen on a busy day in the mall.

Talking about Customer Experience Edge there is a book "The Customer Experience Edge", its well written and good insight on delivering excellent customer experience from RoI to actual satisfaction of delivering excellent customer Service. At the end of March in Dubai the CEM Telecom Summit is going to take place where topics on how to improve customer experiences are going to discussed and lessons learned in various programs are to be presented. Its a very good one to attend even if you are not in the Telco industry since there are technologies that can used outside Telco…. Remember that the hardest customer to please are Telco customers, its not only the service delivered, or the product sold but the overall experience from choosing a phone or tablet to the right subscriptions to the actual experience when using voice and data services and using the device it self….

On "Customer Experience Management in Telcoms: Middle East Summit" One things catches my attention immediately upon looking at the brochure….The topic goes "How do you improve the customer experience of your high value customers to maximize revenue generation".  Delivering Excellent Customer Experience is not always about revenue generation, it is about excellent experience and the value or Returns of Investments it brings.  I would argue that it is better to look at it as Returns of Investments than maximizing revenue. Think of this, with bad customer experience your customers will go away… Putting the  an effective customer experience program should keep customers but the main should be delivering excellent service and not maximizing revenue… while the correct metric to see use in determine success of that program is returns of investment and not necessarily revenue. Do you agree?

Zappos is a very good example. They deliver WOW and by delivering WOW they in return become very profitable… the WOW delivered turns into TRUST and that trust into ADVOCACY thus not only increasing their revenues but also their profits.. More importantly they aim for an excellent customer experience and high profitability comes as an additional benefit. Can your company deliver WOW to your customers?