A couple of weeks back my trusted (rusted?) 3 year old MacBook pro wouldn’t boot. By the sounds of it, it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t something I could fix / hack, so I took it to the local Apple store. I had put on my “I am a Mac” T-shirt hoping to score some brownie points at the genius bar.
A quick diagnosis at the genius bar showed that the motherboard had likely conked. So it had to shipped to their depot to have it replaced. The extended apple care warranty had just expired, but the “genius” at the genius bar was gracious enough to “let it slide” and told me he would take care of it without charging anything. Wow!! That’s probably a good $300 worth of repairs.
I was supposed to have received my machine back in 5 to 7 business days, but lo and behold, I got a call in just 2 days saying my machine was ready. Woot. Awesome Apple. But wait, there is more. Not only was the logic board replaced, Apple had also replaced the optical drive and two fans, since they were not in “good condition”. What a nice gesture. But wait, there is even more!
One of the rubber pads at the bottom of the MacBook had fallen off. I was curious what they had done about it and sure enough all four of them were replaced. I mean, who cares about the rubber pads at the bottom, except of course the user. You don’t even have to be a fanboy like me, to be impressed by such attention to detail.
I was happy enough when Apple fixed my machine for free, even though it was out of warranty. But such attention to detail truly delights your customers. It demonstrates empathy, and it shows your customer that you care about them.
Fixing something with a bunch of goodies makes your customers happy. Going above and beyond what is needed and paying attention to detail delights them enough to write a blog post about it and tell the story to everyone in their inner circle of friends and colleagues.
Are you delighting your customers?