Customer Service: Apple Store

If every store had customer service like we got at the Apple store last night, brick and mortar retail outlets wouldn't be in a slow decline.

We had two problems we needed to have addressed: Macbook with a missing "x" and my son's iPod (that had obviously been stepped on), which needed a new screen.

Initially I was put off by the fact one the reps said we needed to make an appointment -- one for the iPod, one for the Macbook. The fact I had three kids in tow put me in a frame of mind that I didn't want to wait, period. Just tell me how much these things are going to cost to repair so we can get this done!

But these things needed to happen, so I made an appointment for the Macbook, for about 30 minutes after we stepped into the store. (It would have been more than an hour later for an appointment for the iPod; son would have to make arrangements for later.) When we came back, the "Genius" handled the repair on the spot. He brought out an "x" and using a multi-tool obviously tailor made for these kinds of repairs, snapped the key into place within a couple of minutes.

No charge!

The Ants Came Marching

There's an analogy here, that I'm trying to figure out how it could apply to video games and the industry as a whole, especially in light of some dramatic changes that are happening on the retail side of things.

When wood starts to rot, especially in a low-rise apartment building -- due to exposure, poor maintenance practices -- there's an increased risk for carpenter ant infestation. Colonies thrive in this kind of environment so it's not uncommon that if the conditions repeat themselves elsewhere in the building that satellite colonies are created.

They can cause a lot of damage, or at the very least increase the damage already being done to the structure, to the point where wooden members can fail. There are warning signs associated with a carpenter ant infestation but those are often handled by spraying insecticide. And sometimes that's as far as it goes.

If the owner of the apartment can't readily see the problem, it will often leave his mind. Keep up the spraying, keep down the appearance of ants.

But take a seat across the street. Are there a lot of woodpeckers attacking the building? That's a sure sign that the infestation has gone from "manageable" to a job that will cost multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars to address. Not only does it indicate a strong likelihood of an infestation that would cause most of us creepy crawly nightmares, but it also provides a clear indication on how much the building is rotting from the inside out.

Like I wrote above, somehow this example is an analogy for the video game industry... It needs a lot of work at this point. Both the analogy and the video game industry.