The Apple Store Guide to Insanely Great Customer Service

Shopify ^ | Thursday, September 25, 2014 | Humayun Khan

[Star Traveler]

Apple is the fastest growing retailer in history and has dominated the holy covet of retail metrics, sales per square foot, almost since its inception, which currently sits at $4,551.

Pair that with rampant expansion plans that puts the technology giant at 420+ stores around the world, and we're talking some serious revenue numbers, approximately $170 billion worth (2013).

Keeping all that in mind, more and more retailers are trying to figure out Apple's "secret sauce" when it comes to its retail experience, specifically when it comes to customer service, hoping to inspire the same degree of customer loyalty or "cult following" that Apple has.

In this post, I'll dissect some of the core elements that Apples uses to train its retail staff when it comes to delivering a great customer experience so that you as a small business retailer can walk away with some gems of how you can rethink customer service in your own store to inspire greater brand loyalty.

[cynwoody]

I won't go into a Chipotle restaurant. . . they removed pork from their menus because of complaints from Muslims.

Got a link for that? Last time I was in a Chipotle, you could definitely get the other white meat.

Chipotle's nutrition calculator offers carnitas under its Select a Filling option. How about your find your local imam and ask him if carnitas is halal. LOL!

[Swordmaker]

Yeah, a question mark sprang up in my mind when I saw Murphy as #2. Who they? Not around here! Should have checked them out, LOL!

Typical new Murphy USA Store

There is no way a convenience store retailer can do $4200 per square foot selling candy bars, soft drinks and beer, snacks and miscellaneous items in a store with that kind of square footage.

However, look at this:

>
But the vast majority of their stores are like this one.

What's that second store's retail square footage? My guess is maybe 60 square feet at 5' x 12'. If it sells $1000 in snacks a 24 hour day, it's doing really good. I'm being generous at $1000, but that works out to $6,083 per square foot. I guess they could be doing it! Working backward from the number they give, Those tiny stores are actually doing a little over $750 per day so when averaged with the bigger stores much lower $/Sq.Ft returns they get the $4200. It's an honest figure, once I analyzed what is going on.

Grocery stores sell far more than that and cannot even approach $400. Something was very, very fishy until I saw those itty-bitty stores.

That Dollar number for Apple stores is low, too. I've seen other statistics that put it around $6K per square foot, double Tiffany's number. . . and Apple's flagship store in New York at $8K.

[Swordmaker]

They claim it was because pork suppliers weren't raising the pigs according to humane standards. . . but other reports claimed it started with complaints from Muslim customers. It seemed to coincide where the largest majority of Muslims were concentrated.

[Swordmaker]

Chipotle's nutrition calculator offers carnitas under its Select a Filling option. How about your find your local imam and ask him if carnitas is halal. LOL!

They were being picketed by Muslim protestors because the meats were cooked on the same grills. NOT allowed at all. No pork or pig products can be Halal at all. . . or Kosher for that matter.

[Pelham]

Forget your Chipotle. This is the real deal:

http://www.taqueriadeanda.com/

Might be a long drive, however.

[cynwoody]

The main problem, of course, is not just location and space, but the cost of maintaining trained people to work when they are so spread out. They might have to hire more orthodox Americans, too! Maybe that's the problem?

In my experience, Apple stores do seem to do extraordinarily well on their hiring.

Their folks look completely random. Until you engage them and lay out a problem. At that point, you realize you're not in a Best Buy nor a Radio Shack of recent decades. It would be interesting to know how much of the advantage is employee selection vs training and coaching.

But Apple gets more stores, I do not think they all need to be as big as their present average size which you cite.

I live fairly centrally within a 400,000 population center of about 4+ cities and many burbs, and towns, but I have to drive about 100 miles north or south to get to the nearest Apple Store.

Out in the boonies, the square footage would not be the expense that it is in the population centers where Apple sites their stores. But, of course, it wouldn't be zero, nor would the cost of staff. It probably comes down to their estimate of total traffic and ensuing business.

[Swordmaker]

Forget your Chipotle. This is the real deal:

NAH! If you want real Mexican you have to get it from a Roach Coach:

Taquueria El Grullense, Stockton, CA

Made by real Mexicans without Green Cards. . . fresh from the border.

[21twelve]

“when it comes to customer service...”

The headphones on my daughter’s I-pod quit working. The Apple store said they couldn’t be fixed, and offered her $50 off on a newer product or a phone, etc. which would have run at least another $150.

I did a Google search and saw that the headphone jacks are prone to breaking on them. $2.50 for the part on Ebay, an hour of watching numerous youtube repair videos, and a half-hour to repair it and I was done!

6 months later she got her first smart-phone (Android), and I don’t think she has used her I-pod since! Also got the expandable memory for her phone on line (64gb at $24) rather than at the Verizon shop (32gb at $50).

I’ll tell you though - that fricken Verizon store was like buying a car with all of the waiting, selling you the extra options (like the memory), and then the idiot trying to program the phone. We were in there for over two hours! For a phone!!! And they STILL didn’t do it right. My wife was on the phone for another 2-3 hours. Plus another trip to the store!!! (So yes, Verizon customer service sucked.)

[BunnySlippers]

In n Out

[BunnySlippers]

Apple people have to have a certain grade point average and the fact that they were an Apple retail person shows well in a resume.

[paul544]

Same thing in the mall here. The Apple store is packed every weekend. The MS store has more employees than customers.

[Weirdad]

Exactly my points. The store space is not the problem (and smaller stores might be possible), but quality employees are expensive (not only in wages/benefits, but in acquisition and training costs) and might be even more expensive if their stores are spread out.

Apple does have employees in the larger Best Buy stores, and they are often BETTER for customers on certain things than in the Apple Stores, because they tend to know and be able to discuss all the alternatives people are being exposed to. But they can’t fix your broken screen themselves.

Again, though, not in Best Buy where I live: too small apparently. Samsung has reps here though. Just making an observation, no implications, y’all can make your own conclusions.

[aMorePerfectUnion]

“Chipotle is to Mex what PF Chang is to Chinese”

Whatever it is, it serves good food fast and is kicking the rear ends of most other fast food restaurants. People gladly wait to pay extra for good food.

[Pelham]

Sword, those roach coach cooks work at Taqueria de Anda in their time off. Hard workers looking to get ahead!

[ReignOfError]

I have recently had a lot of “This web page is trying to open an app outside of Facebook. Are you sure you want to open it?” dialog boxes when viewing outside links in the Facebook app. I usually tap cancel, but when I let it go through, It tries to invoke an outside app, and goes to the app store if it’s not available.

It is normal for the App Store to pop up when you tap on an ad, but this is occurring before the page has even finished loading. Best I can figure is that someone has discovered a new Javascript trick that invokes the app in Facebook’s browser. I have not seen that behavior in Safari.

[Pelham]

In n Out is the best for burgers. But if you want your authentic soft taco with, say, brain or tongue then it has to be Taqueria de Anda. I stick with the chicken or pork.

[ReignOfError]

In my experience, Apple’s Maps has a better interface and updates faster for missed turns than Google Maps or even TomTom. Its traffic reporting is the weakest of the three (and is why I spent the money for TomTom), but its greatest weakness is the points of interest database (which I think they licensed from Yelp). If you have a street address, Apple Maps is great. If you’re looking for the nearest drug store, less so.

I haven’t done a lot of testing with it in the last year or so, so it might have gotten some recent improvements.

[ReignOfError]

I have recently had a lot of “This web page is trying to open an app outside of Facebook. Are you sure you want to open it?” dialog boxes when viewing outside links in the Facebook app. I usually tap cancel, but when I let it go through, It tries to invoke an outside app, and goes to the app store if it’s not available.

It is normal for the App Store to pop up when you tap on an ad, but this is occurring before the page has even finished loading. Best I can figure is that someone has discovered a new Javascript trick that invokes the app in Facebook’s browser. I have not seen that behavior in Safari.

[BunnySlippers]

I just ran it through Chowhound and it gets good reviews.

I’ll try it. Sometimes I forget Freepers can live close by.

[Swordmaker]

It is normal for the App Store to pop up when you tap on an ad, but this is occurring before the page has even finished loading. Best I can figure is that someone has discovered a new Javascript trick that invokes the app in Facebook’s browser. I have not seen that behavior in Safari.

That is a JAVA script function. . . and some Ad companies have figured out how to call it. The App Store has a URL, so it is fairly easy to call it, but it supposed to be intentional, not automatic. MacDailyNews ad server was doing that and they were trying to find a way to block it from their website. It appears to be inherent in HTML5.