Steve Jobs has spent decades designing, building and perfecting the Apple customer experience. However, in recent weeks all this hard work seems to have been slowly degraded by bad press and an increasingly poor service relationship with their suppliers.
Patty Seybold, over at Outside Innovation, has put together a great post examining how the carefully curated Apple customer experience has been tarnished by recent events with ‘Antennagate’ and their customers ever-diminishing satisfaction with the American network supplier AT&T. It brings up a great issue when designing your customer experience. No matter how brilliantly you can build a great experience your side, it can be ruined by any one of your partners if they are directly part of your experience.
If you sell a product then where is it retailing? How is it positioned in-store? If you offer a service then is it replicated the same though-out all your franchises nationwide? This is always a problem the larger your organisation gets, the more people you have to manage and the more diverse your product/service offering gets.
Read the original article on Apple by Patty here
