Apple's Other Excellence

You know, there's a lot of buzz about Apple these days, what with the fantastic gains of the iPhone in the market, the dominance of the iPod, and how great Mac OS X is compared to Vista.

But there's another realm of excellence I experienced today: customer service.

I had a problem with my iPhone that was annoying me for the past few days, and I called customer service about it, even though I was out of warranty. I was prepared to pay for some pay-as-you-go tech support to get the issue fixed.

The person on the other end of the line was very helpful and friendly, and walked me through all the basic troubleshooting steps, and then into the advanced steps. Finally, we decided that the best thing to do would be a complete software reinstall, so rather than make him wait through it, I let him go, saying I could handle it from there. He sent me an email so that I could pick up with him personally if that didn't work.

Now, at that point, I figured I was done with tech support unless I called them back.

However, while I was going through the software install, I received a call from another Apple customer service representative. He said that they were talking about my case after I hung up with them, and he wanted to ask me a few follow-up questions. They'd begun to suspect it was a hardware issue.

Seriously. These guys remain service-oriented on an issue after you have hung up with them and the ball is no longer in their court.

Not only that, but they are going to fix the hardware issue for free and send me a loaner iPhone to cover me while it's being repaired.

I have to say, if I wasn't an Apple fan already, I would be now. I can't remember when I've had such a positive experience with calling tech support for a product. Yes, a hardware issue is frustrating, but it happens. What matters is knowing that Apple will step up to the plate and make it right when it does.