Customer Delight at Apple

Apple has always been known for its award winning support delivered through the AppleCare team. In fact, they have regularly won awards for the high-level of customer satisfaction (CSAT), typically exceeding the 90% barrier.

Issue

The fact that AppleCare exceeds expectation is not a mistake; like all things at Apple, it’s by design. Apple recognizes that by investing in this area of the business — an area which is typically regarded as cost center — they are able to create raving fans even during times of crisis.

However, within the AppleCare division, one area they traditionally struggled with was iTunes, the music product which fueled all of the growth in their iPod brand. Prior to engagement with the Ironwood Agency, CSAT in the iTunes division hovered at 30%. To make matters worse, the iTunes product and accompanying iPod family functioned as bridge designed to ultimately bring PC users into the Apple ecosystem.

Diagnostics

Ironwood Agency attacked the problem from three angles:

1. Data
2. Process
3. Automation

Solutions

The iTunes division was unique in that it was doing support for 10,000 daily tickets across hundreds of agents using email. Translation: Lots of Data! By examining the CSAT as compared to the templates used, it was quickly obvious which 20% of the responses were driving 80% of the outrage from customers. 

It would then only be natural to pass the offending templates through specially trained white glove copywriters — which we ultimately did of course! — but, it gave us the opportunity to ask, “Is there something deeper here which is causing the problem?” That is, could it be that the process itself is being seen by the customer as offensive, regardless of the message. And, what we found was that, with each template, there was a corresponding process which was driving the issue. For instance, if a customer purchased a duplicate song, they were not given a refund. And, though it was only $0.99 cents, the customers were extremely offended. Moreover, each support case was costing Apple $6. 

Each of the processes were ultimately re-examined by management with guidance of Ironwood Agency to find solutions that equally befitted the needs of the business and the customer.

The other prime complaint from Customers was the slow response time, especially for repeated contacts. As you might imagine, Apple tends to have a very seasonal business with new customers arriving on Christmas morning to spend the gift cards from their relatives. As they are new to the system, they are bound to have issues. And, when those issues arose, the AppleCare team could not keep up. As such, we worked with Apple to automate some of the responses (including refunds!) based on form fills from the website. 

Results

Engaging with the Ironwood Agency paid for itself many times over through the increase of CSAT to 80%, the reduction in workforce through automation. With the new army of raving fans, Apple was able to introduce add-ons to Customers at POS which made the business even more profitable and unleashed more budget for new products.