Company Culture: the three best applications of Apple’s excellent customer service

Apples customer service

At gunnercooke, our model is based around a culture of innovation.

We passionately believe that without a culture, any business model can be copied. For this reason, we place so much emphasis upon developing and strengthening the ethos and cultural heart of gunnercooke. We strive to enable our lawyers to operate quickly, efficiently and with clients at the forefront of their minds.

While company culture has arguably always been important, it’s become a popular point of discussion over the past 20 years or so – and is something that is becoming more important than ever as the modern workplace continues to evolve.

First of all, it’s clear to see the benefits for businesses who have implemented a strong, unified company culture. Culture not only contributes to your company’s vision and values, it also adds significant gravitas to your brand identity. If you create a corporate atmosphere centred around a distinct cultural identity, your customers will soon reap the benefits. In addition, customers will establish a loyalty toward you and return. 20% of a businesses customers make up 80% of sales.

In this series, we’ll be taking a closer look at those businesses who have implemented a strong company culture, and what it is that has enabled them to go that extra mile in providing excellent customer service, which in turn, has led them to attract loyal and supportive customers.

In our first blog, we’ll be focusing on Apple and what ‘applications’ they employed to ensure they provide their customers with a personal, passionate service that makes all the difference. The company has quickly evolved to become a bastion of customer service, noted particularly for their unique approach to personalisation and convenience. Below are three key reasons why.

They create value beyond sales

Visiting an Apple store isn’t just your usual shopping experience. All Apple employees get tasks to enrich lives with knowledge and . One of their core values is to ‘politely probe to understand customer needs’. As such, all employees are trained to ask the right questions and make customers feel at ease.

Apple don’t just want their customers to walk in the front door and buy a product straight off the shelf; they want to advise, change and innovate the way their customers think about the possibilities of technology and communication.

They make their own rules                                                        

Apple didn’t place themselves at the forefront of brilliant service by following the design set out in conventional staff handbooks. The idea of the ‘Genius Bar’ alone reinvented the concept of try-before-you-buy and made technology accessible for people of all ages.

You can book a time slot with a ‘Genius’ before visiting the store, so you don’t have to wait around. Also, all customers receive emails as receipts, so you will never see or hear a printer whirring away as Jobs believed this didn’t add to the in-store experience.

Their stores create a social environment

Apple stores have a distinctive layout: long tables with products prominently placed in the middle. Their stores are incredibly interactive. Apple employees encourage customers to walk around and try out different phones, tablets and laptops, all the while facing or standing next to another customer.

Browsing an Apple store becomes a social experience where customers interact with both other customers and members of staff. Conversations that often start with a simple trigger, such as ‘How did you do that?’, help build product and brand awareness in store and makes each customer’s personal experience more memorable and easy to share with their friends.