CUSTOMERS.COM® RESEARCH FROM THE PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP
What Can Damage Apple’s Amazing Customer Experience and Brand?
Network Congestion Will Be a Challenge Even to Steve Jobs
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, June 17, 2010
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Apple has set the bar for customer experience in so many ways. Let’s
begin to count them:
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Product/service design
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Product/service introduction
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Out-of-the-box experience
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Service (iTunes) experience
•
User experience
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Brand experience seduction and advocacy
•
Retail experience
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Customer service in the store
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Customer service on the phone
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Returns/replacements/exchanges
Recently, I’ve been impressed by the number of stories I’ve head
from Apple users about amazing customer service experiences around returns,
exchanges, and upgrades with no questions asked—essentially exceeding
customers’ expectations. I’ve also heard lots of great stories
about Apple’s skill at setting (and exceeding) expectations for deliveries
of scarce products.
I’ve also been noticing the difference between the Apple retail experience
and magnetism and that of all other stores. For example, in downtown San Francisco,
the two-story store is always packed, yet there’s ample room for several
dogs to be lying on the floor near their owners, and nobody has to wait too
long before they can get their hands on an iPad to try. And the checkout lines
are expedited. In sleepy Ardmore, Pennsylvania—in a downtown area that
was originally designed to serve rich Main Line women who had nothing to do
all day except shop and lunch with their friends—all the department stores
and boutiques are now virtually abandoned since that lifestyle was replaced
by busy two (+)-career families. The chic shopping section of Ardmore is now
a ghost town. But there are two vibrant retail establishments: Trader Joe’s
and the Apple Store. You walk down a nearly empty sidewalk to the Apple Store,
open the door, and feel like you’ve entered a different universe. It’s
teaming with customers and activity. Your immediate thought is, “Buy
Apple Stock!”
Partnering with Suppliers Who Can’t Match the Apple Experience
Since Apple has raised the bar so high, it’s tricky for Apple to find
partners who are up to the challenge of supporting the experience that Apple
users have become addicted to. Given the care with which Steve Jobs imbues
every atom of the customer experience he creates when designing a product or
service, why doesn’t Apple have better quality control for vetting its
partners’ experiences?
© 2010 Apple
Why Does Apple Stick with AT&T in the U.S.??
So the question I’ keep asking myself, and have been asking ever since
the launch of the iPhone, is why the near-exclusive partnership with AT&T
(in the U.S.)—a brand in mobile telephony that has become synonymous
with lousy coverage? In the U.S., Apple has persisted in giving AT&T long
periods of exclusivity for the iPhone. Verizon
is still dithering about when
its iPhone will become available.
But why? AT&T has been notorious in letting customers down. Let’s
count the ways:
•
Spotty wireless coverage in the U.S.
•
Too little bandwidth for data-intensive users
•
Bad customer experience dealing with AT&T
•
Hacking of iPad Users’ Data
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AT&T’s handling of the iPhone 4 Launch, including a second data breach!
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has a wonderful post entitled, “Oh
AT&T, could you have FAILed any harder on iPhone 4 pre-order day?” In
the post, he says, “I really don’t think so…” then
he lists all the failures on AT&T’s side….and goes on to say:
“This is a complete and utter mess, and it’s amazing to think of
Apple standing on the sidelines looking on at this disastrous handling of the
pre-order of a flagship product.”
Why Did the iPhone 4 Not Work During Jobs’ Announcement?
On June 7th, Steve Jobs announced the next iPhone—the product whose popularity
swamped AT&T’s infrastructure and reportedly caused Apple to halt
order acceptance after 600,000 orders were placed. Less widely reported, but
important, was the glitch that occurred DURING the announcement itself. As
everyone knows, Apple announcements are carefully staged and prepared. So it
came as a surprise to everyone, including Steve Jobs, when he couldn’t
do his iPhone 4 demo! He wound up having to ask everyone in the audience to
turn off their computers and phones so that he could have enough bandwidth
to complete the demo. Jordan Robertson reported this in “Data
congestion thwarts Steve Jobs' iPhone demo,” an AP wire story picked
up by The Washington Post, Forbes, and many other news sources.
Network Data Congestion Will Damage the Customer Experience
One of the people who noticed this glitch at the iPhone 4 announcement was
my husband, Tom Hagan. He has been ruminating about wireless spectrum capacity
recently, ever since he attended my brother Andrew Seybold’s Wireless
University seminar in Las Vegas this Spring. As Andy described in detail
how spectrum is allocated and managed, Tom’s head was spinning. Then,
during a break, Andy and several other folks whipped out their smartphones
to show each other their video-on-demand capabilities. When Andy played
his video, it looked great! When the second user launched his, it was slower.
By the time the fifth user in the group tried to launch a video, all of
them started to degrade. Tom’s “Aha!” was that there’s
no way our current wireless infrastructure will deliver the kind of user
experience that people are expecting.
Here are some of his thoughts on this topic, from his post, “Video
on Cell Phones? Not Soon”:
“One of the things that ‘everybody knows that just ain’t so’ is
that we will all soon be watching videos on our cell phones.
The rather sudden appearance of wideband Web access via cable, largely due
to the enormous capacity of fiber optics, has induced many to believe
incorrectly that the same is about to happen for wireless communication,
via either 3G or 4G phone networks. Not so.
The entire available wireless spectrum available to cell phone users must
be divided among the concurrent users reached by a single transmitter
at the base station for the cell. That spectrum is sufficient for thousands
of voice users, but only for many fewer concurrent video users — maybe
100 or so. Even five concurrent video downloads can confound a given
base station in a cell tower at present.
There is just not enough spectrum available to provide video to the thousands
of concurrent cell phones within the footprint of a typical cell tower
today. Those towers are dotted around the landscape in church towers
and fake pine trees, each one covering many square miles of geography
containing many wireless cell phone users. Coverage is annoyingly spotty
today even for voice, both because towers are not numerous enough, leaving
dead spots, and also because some base stations are trying to serve too
many users at once. And that’s just for audio. Even low quality
video, equivalent to old analog VHS tapes, soaks up the bandwidth of
more than 20 voice channels."
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