Above and Beyond

Posted June 20th, 2009

I bought a new iPhone at my local Apple store yesterday. People make fun of the Apple “fan boys” but they don’t understand  that Apple works to earn these fans in much the same way Disney does. I’ve done contract work for both companies and they each focus on the customer (I can’t bring myself to use the word “guest” in this context) experience in a way that doesn’t occur to most companies.

Most companies would think that they are just selling you a phone. Honestly, that’s all Apple owed me. I give them money and in return they give me a phone. Apple looked at the contact they had with me differently.

I was able to reserve or pre-order a phone. I’ve never bought something from Apple on the first day so I decided to reserve it at my local store and see what happened. I could have saved an hour or two by having it mailed to me but the web site said the store opened at 8 and I figured there wouldn’t be many people waiting for this third generation of the phone.

On Thursday I got an email reminder of my reservation with a note that the stores would now open at 7 am. I figured I’d show up at 7:30 and the initial rush would have been taken care of.

Unfortunately, when I got to the Apple store at 7:30 there was a line outside. In fact, there were two lines. One was for people who had reserved their phones and one was for people who hadn’t.

There was a light rain. I hadn’t thought I would be standing outside so I hadn’t brought an umbrella. That’s ok. Apple had rented umbrellas for everyone in line. I missed the pile of umbrellas as I headed to the back of the line but I noticed that most people in line had the exact same type of umbrella so I asked the guy in front of me and he said there was a stack of them up front. An Apple employee overheard our conversation and handed me his and headed up to the front of the line to get another one for himself.

Another Apple employee was walking the line with her iPhone checking that people in the registered line had actually registered. She typed in my last name and when the registration popped up confirmed my first name and the model I had reserved. When she couldn’t find the guy in front of me on the list, she checked a print out to see if his name was there. She then went into the store to check a third list. When she said she couldn’t find him anywhere he admitted that he hadn’t reserved one and she walked him over to the other line where he still was able to get his new phone.

After we’d been in line a while the employee who had lent me his umbrella came out with a case of water and a case of NutriGrain bars and offered them to anyone who wanted one.

When they moved us into the store the situation inside was also well thought out and smooth. Someone checked us in and werved as the dispatcher passing us off to the next available sales person. The salesperson, Ken in my case, got my phone out of the back and waited while I selected a case. He verified my identity and charged me for the phone and took me over to the next table where someone quickly activated my phone. They then set me up at a free spot to restore my old phone data onto my new phone.

I lost count of how many Apple employees turned to thank me for my purchase, smiled and told me to enjoy my phone, and exhorted me to have a great day. It was strangely not annoying.

Very smooth. It was all about me. When I left the store I was satisfied and had a great feeling about the whole experience. If I had been a Windows user an experience like this might have pushed me in the direction of trying a Mac the next time I needed to purchase a laptop or desktop. The iPhone and this experience is both a product and an opportunity to sell me on future purchases.

This is something that Kathy Sierra has talked about for years. Companies benefit when they keep their focus on the consumer’s needs. In other words, when Apple makes the experience all about me, I end up seeing what’s so special about them.

So how can you do this in your every day life? Although this may seem far-fetched, this is the axis on which our recent books by Chad Fowler and Andy Lester are superior.

Say you’re going for a job interview. You can send in your resume and send it in with a form cover letter in which you fill in the addressee’s name, address, and job description. It’s real work to customize your job search to each company you are applying for. But when you focus on the needs of the company, they will see what is special about you. That, for me, was one of the big takeaways in Land the Tech Job you Love.

Now suppose you are in a job. You can work on the tasks you are assigned and produce an honest day’s worth of good work. You can also take a step back to understand what your skills are and see how you can improve them to help your company and help yourself. You can understand the importance of the project you are working on and think about who will be using this feature and what their needs are. You can go through the motions each day and still produce acceptable work or you can become a Passionate Programmer.

I hope these leaps don’t feel like too much of a stretch to you. Most of my most valuable lessons have come from making these leaps. I became a much better teacher after working in a restaurant kitchen. I became a better teacher of future teachers after seeing Paul Newman talk about acting on “Inside the Actors Studio.”

My time in line at the Apple store helped me understand what is so special about Chad and Andy’s books and reminds me what we are looking for in Pragmatic Life titles.

This post initially appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.