Apple has a reputation for stellar customer service and Chrisg shared his story of The Coolest Experience I Had as an Apple Store Employee.
He talks about assisting a group of students who were all communicating in sign language with each other and their teacher.
And then it dawned on me that all of these students were all speaking to one another in sign language.
They were from a school for the deaf.
The story continues later in the day when he came upon the same group on the mall’s food court and learned it was an assignment. The students were all pretending to be deaf to see how they were treated as they visited different stores in the mall.
The next part of her story made me feel awesome inside: She said that I was the only person they worked with all day that had treated them like real people, and actually tried to be as helpful as the situation allowed. They had all been impressed with my idea of using TextEdit to communicate, because nobody else in the mall had even bothered to grab a pen and some paper.
You never know who will get to help everyday. Every interaction you have with a customer is a chance to make their day a little better. In this case, Chris got to make these kids feel good in contrast to everyone else they had met. And in return, he got the great feeling of making their day better through great service.
This reminded me of a time when I worked for Best Buy over the Christmas holiday. I was in college and needed the extra money so I was a seasonal employee with Best Buy working in the PC/Home Office department.
One day, I had an older gentleman come into the store. He was looking to buy a printer and I quickly realized he was hard of hearing so talking out.
He wasn’t deaf so he didn’t sign and neither did I, but I did have a pen in my pocket so I pulled a sheet of paper from a nearby printer and we had a long conversation about printer features and costs. How many pages would this printer hold? What did I recommend for pictures versus documents? How much was the ink going to be when it ran out? What was the most reliable machine?
I “talked” with him for a half hour answering all of his questions and at the end he thanked me and made his choice and wished me a Merry Christmas.
It made me feel great that I could take the time to help him get exactly what he needed and he didn’t feel neglected.
The best feeling in customer service is when I can give great service because the reward is how you feel afterwards.