Ok, I spent enough time bitching about my miserable customer service experiences last year, so I figured I’d do the right thing and give a shout out to the business sales office at the 5th Ave Apple Store here in NY. At work, I was building a new QLab playback rig (a redundant rig with two Mac Mini’s that’s quite sexy, if I might be so bold), and I called the Apple Store to arrange a purchase of a new Mac Mini, including an upgrade to 2 GB of RAM.
The guy I spoke to told me that they couldn’t hold the computer or RAM upgrade for me (I even offered to pay over the phone, but they wouldn’t do that), but assured me that they had it in stock, no problem. I made it clear that sending a fairly highly paid union scale technician over to pick it up was going to be expensive, especially since I had to wait for the RAM to be upgraded about an hour (and had to do it after hours in OT because we were crazy busy), so I couldn’t afford to send somebody on a wild goose chase if they didn’t have it, and he again assured me that it would be no problem.
Of course, I get there, and they’ve got the computer, but, “Oh, we’re out of the RAM for that machine. We might be able to get it by Thursday (this was Tues), but we can’t promise.” After a bit of back and forth, they agreed to waive the upgrade fee if I had to come back at a later time for the upgrade, or get it from another store (normally, it’s installed free with purchase of the machine, but after the fact, there’s an install charge to upgrade).
I called back Thurs afternoon, and spoke with a concierge, who told me that yes, they did have it the RAM in stock, and that they would put it aside for me, and apologized for the hassle. We hang up, and send somebody over with the computer, and as she’s walking out the door, the guy calls back. He says that the business sales office is on a conference call with corporate for about an hour, but one of the guys in the office needed to talk to me about the order, could he call me in an hour. I said sure, but that I’d already sent somebody out with the computer, would it be ok. He said not to worry. I was puzzled, but waited for the call.
Finally, I get a call back from the guy (whose name unfortunately I can’t remember, I think it was Jason, but don’t have the paperwork here), who apologized profusely for the problems. He told me that the original guy I spoke to should have set it aside for me, and he didn’t yet know why I was told they couldn’t. As a way to make it up to us, since he knew it cost us a fair amount of money sending somebody over twice, he gave us the RAM upgrade for free. Yes, we’ll be going back there again :-)
So, that was a bit long and rambling, but short version, Apple does bad, Apple makes good, Andy is happy (and so is his boss, and the client with the sexy new QLab rig!).
Now if only my MacBook Pro would stop with the keyboard and trackpad freezes it’s started having since I upgraded to Leopard :-/
–A