The Apple Experience: Secrets to Building Insanely Great Customer Loyalty (10 page)

According to Reichheld, Apple Store employees know where they rank among their peers in terms of NPS and where their store ranks relative to other stores in the region. Promoters are celebrated.

Apple Store managers recognize employees who create promoters of their customers; some stores even put photos of these
employees next to the promoter’s comment text, and then scroll them across a large-screen TV monitor in the employee break room. Meanwhile, Apple’s central NPS team analyzes customer feedback from all the stores to understand the systemic reasons for promoters’ enthusiasm. Though you might expect that the primary source of enthusiasm was Apple’s amazing products or its cool store design, by far the most common reason promoters give for their happiness is the way store employees treated them.
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The higher the NPS, the closer Apple employees are to reaching their goal of enriching lives.

Apple began measuring NPS in 2007 when there were 163 stores. The NPS score was 58. Today, with well over 350 stores, Apple’s NPS score tops 70 percent and some of the best stores rank above 90 percent, a remarkable achievement. “Where a typical electronics store might record $1,200 per square foot in sales, mature Apple stores exceed an estimated $6,000 per square foot. This is by far the highest productivity in retailing of any kind.”
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Johnson realized that only passionate employees who were promoters themselves could ever transform customers into promoters, and that’s why feedback is so critical between employees and managers. Both must feel comfortable about bringing up issues that might impact the NPS ranking. Apple is so serious about internal promoters, it developed a Net Promoter for People (NPP) system. Under NPP, store employees are surveyed every four months to determine whether or not they would recommend the store as a great place to work. Yes, profits are important. But profits won’t appear unless you first enrich lives, and that includes the lives of your employees.

A few minutes after I left an Apple Store having purchased a Macbook Air, I received an e-mail with the subject line: “Share your
thoughts on the Apple Store.” It explained that Apple would like my feedback to make my next visit even better. The e-mail said it would take five minutes to fill out the survey. The survey is facilitated by a third-party, independent market research firm, but the questions are all based on NPS.

The first two pages of the Apple feedback form asked simple questions to determine what type of product I had purchased and whether I bought it online or in the store. Page three is where it became interesting with the following questions:

“Overall, how satisfied were you with your most recent experience at the Apple Store?” The score reflected a 0 to 10 scale: 0 = Not at all satisfied, 5 = Neutral, and 10 = Extremely satisfied.

The next question was the ultimate question: “How likely are you to recommend the Apple Store to a friend or family member?” Again, 0 means “Not at all likely” and 10 means “Extremely likely.”

Page four asked questions such as, “How did this particular visit influence your likelihood to recommend the Apple Store?” It also contained an open field where I could fill in my response to the following question: “What would you tell someone when recommending the experience at the Apple Store?”

The following question was intended to measure the elements Apple believes are important to the overall customer experience, “When thinking about your experience at the Apple Store, how would you rate your satisfaction with the following aspects?”

 

• Store employees were friendly and made me feel welcome.
  
 

• I was assisted in a reasonable amount of time.
  
 

• I was given the personal attention I wanted.
  
 

• Store employees were knowledgeable about products and services.
  
 

• The checkout process was efficient.
  

The final question is also meant to evaluate the efficacy of the feedback loop, “Which of the following benefits, if any, have you heard of at the Apple Store (select all that apply)?”

 

• Personalized setup of your new Apple product
  
 

• Free workshops, including hands-on classes
  
 

• Technical support and repair services at the Genius Bar
  
 

• One to One program
  
 

• A dedicated business team
  
 

• The Apple Store app for the iPhone
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Apple Store employees realize that each of these store elements improves the quality of the customer experience. They are trained to make sure the customer is aware of the classes, workshops, Apple Care support, and so on. It’s drilled into them daily. If they read it or heard it once during their initial training, they would likely forget to bring them up. But since they are given feedback every day, they rarely miss an opportunity to educate the customer.

In October 2011, Sheila Seberg of Newport Beach was forced to cancel a flight on US Airways because her husband had suffered a major heart attack. The airline refused to refund the value of the $560 ticket but would extend the time in which it could be redeemed, so long as Seberg paid a $150 fee to change it!

“I was shocked,”
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Seberg told a newspaper. “It’s not like I frivolously decided not to take the trip. My husband almost died. But they showed no compassion.” The Sebergs were loyal customers. They had racked up frequent flyer miles because Seberg’s husband, Richard, was a dentist and flew US Airways every week to Las Vegas, where he had a second practice. He flew every week for fifteen years.

I read the Seberg story in the
Los Angeles Times
. Seberg had become a detractor, and in these days of rapidly traveling social media, any negative comment gets a megaphone. Seberg posted a comment to a social network that, in turn, caught the eye of a reporter in Los Angeles. On Twitter the story got retweeted hundreds of times with added comments such as “Ahhh, just another example of US Airways glorious customer service (note sarcasm),”
or “US Airways is the WORST. Read about MY experience with them. …” People were not only reading and sharing Seberg’s story, they were adding their own! On a whim, I checked the NPS ranking for US Airways. I thought I had discovered a typo when I read “negative 12 percent.” That’s right. US Airways had net more detractors than promoters. A negative NPS score can’t be good for anyone—employees, customers, or shareholders.

During the same week Seberg’s US Airways story was circulating on the Internet, another story was going viral. This story involved a ten-year-old girl who had saved her allowance money for nine months to buy a new product. She literally brought a mason jar full of coins and cash to the store, but it had just closed. When the little girl and her parents saw that it was closed, they were sad and decided to walk around the mall. Much to their surprise, a store manager caught up to them, apologized, and led the girl back into the store. The employees all applauded and made the little girl feel like a princess. She poured out the contents of her jar and bought her product. As she was leaving, an employee approached her and said, “I have to tell you. This made my day.” This store had an NPS of more than 70 percent. It was an Apple Store, and the product was an iPod Touch. This story, too, hit the blogosphere and was retweeted hundreds of times.

Both stories reinforce the power of feedback, or the lack of it. It’s likely that the US Airways employee didn’t even know about NPS nor was given feedback by a manager on how to improve the customer experience. The employee was also not empowered to do what is right. Remember the admonition that Steve Jobs left to his employees shortly before his death: “Don’t ask, what would Steve do? Instead ask, is it the right thing?”

By contrast, the Apple employee who chased after the girl’s family and invited them back into the store knew three things: he would not be chastised for breaking the rules, he was enriching a little girl’s life, and the parents would probably offer glowing feedback, which they did through their social networks.

“Every leader of a business leaves a legacy when he or she departs, and it is that legacy by which a leader is judged. If you want to leave a legacy that extends beyond profits, a legacy of caring about
customers and employees and about the kind of company you have built, a legacy of enriching the lives you touched, NPS is an indispensable tool,”
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says Reichheld. Anyone can sell products. Most do it badly because they don’t care about leaving a legacy. They don’t care about enriching lives. Steve Jobs cared about legacy. Jobs told Isaacson, “I hate it when people call themselves entrepreneurs when what they’re really trying to do is launch a start-up and then sell or go public so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That’s how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You build a company that will stand for something a generation or two from now.”
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If you want to build a brand that awes people and a company that lasts, you must hire the right people, create the right culture, and constantly provide feedback for that culture to survive.

C
arolyn DiPiero, a retired schoolteacher living in Modesto, California, walked into an Apple Store in August 2011 and had such a magical experience she had to share it with me. DiPiero had never used a Mac, but after her first visit to an Apple Store, she was turned into a customer and an avid evangelist.

For fifteen years DiPiero had been sharing a PC at home with her husband, and she finally decided to get a laptop of her own. But the decision wasn’t easy at first. Her kids were divided on the topic. DiPiero’s daughter was a Mac user but her son, a PC user.

“Why should I buy a PC?”
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DiPiero asked her son.

“Because it’s less expensive than a Mac,” he said.

“Why should I buy a Mac?” DiPiero asked her daughter.

“Because it doesn’t get viruses,” she said.

The virus logic caught DiPiero’s attention. “I was definitely tired of cleaning viruses off our PC,” DiPiero told me. “Finding someone to cure a computer virus is tougher than finding a doctor who takes Medicare.”

The Apple Store at Modesto’s Vintage Faire Mall is sandwiched between two boutiques, Coach and bebe. DiPiero always knew it was different because, well, it looked different. Gazing through the megasized floor-to-ceiling windows, DiPiero could see that the store looked clean and uncluttered, a far cry from the typical department store DiPiero would visit. The design was just the beginning of DiPiero’s Apple experience. It would be one of the most unique shopping experiences of her life and ultimately convince her to become an Apple customer.

Upon entering the store, DiPiero looked for the cash register. All department stores have a cash register, she assumed. She didn’t see any. Instead “Jeff” approached her, introduced himself, and asked how he could help. “Everyone looked involved, interested, and interesting,” she said. “At department stores, you can’t find a clerk to help you or to talk to. And if you do, the employees are talking to each other about their work schedule or other office-related issues. Also, most employees never make eye contact. The Apple Store was completely different.”

A former elementary schoolteacher, DiPiero was used to surveying the room to keep an eye on how everyone was interacting. She noticed that the Apple employees were doing the same thing, an action she described as “multitasking.” Although employees were taking care of several people at the same time, DiPiero felt as though she was getting personalized attention. “It reminded me of being a teacher,” she said. “When a teacher has yard duty, they multitask. They scan the playground. You’re looking at the whole picture. You see those kids clear across the yard? What’s brewing over there? Should I be ready to step in? You can tell by a child’s body language. It’s a skill you learn as a teacher.” DiPiero says she has never used the word
multitasking
to describe employees in any other retail environment, but it was clear that Apple employees were indeed juggling multiple customers while making each one feel important.