A Short Story of Customer Service

A short story of customer service. 

A few days ago Lee pointed out that there were black spots on my iPhone pictures. I had sort of noticed them, but it had been happening very gradually over that past few months, and was only noticeable when there was a light background in a photo. Honestly in the last picture I took I thought they were birds! But once I noticed them they were suddenly VERY noticeable, and very annoying. 

After doing some research we determined that the spots were in the camera sensor. I called Apple, fully expecting to discover that I would need to replace my phone. The customer service lady I worked with, whose first name was Alethia, first made sure that it was indeed a hardware and not a software problem. This took at least an hour of her on the phone (and then on skype), guiding me through the process. Then she said she would need to talk to tech support and see if Apple would fix or replace my phone, even though it was almost two years old and out of warranty. We scheduled a call back for Thursday.

Thursday morning I went for a run.  When I finished I saved my run on my Garmin watch as usual. Later when I went to look at my data (I love me some running stats!) I realized that my run wasn’t there. Doing a little digging I found that instead of saving my run normally, I had an invalid file saved on my watch. I called Garmin and they basically said, “these things happen sometimes. Sorry, just delete the file.” WHAT??? This is not some cheapo watch! This is a fancy pants serious runners watch, a Garmin 920xt. I was flabbergasted.

I decided to do a little research myself and discovered that it was possible to isolate the file and manually upload the file to Strava and get my stats saved that way, which I did. Saved!

Later on Thursday Alithia called me back. Apple agreed to replace my phone under full warranty. They sent me a new iPhone 6s on Friday, and I mailed my broken phone back to them that afternoon, free of charge!

Kudos to Apple for going above and beyond and delighting this even more loyal customer with their amazing customer service! Kudos to Strava for having software that works and can fix Garmin’s problems when Garmin could not. And shame on Garmin, for having good products that are poorly supported. When it comes time to replace that Garmin watch I’m going to a different company! And guess what? When it finally becomes time to replace that iPhone 6s, I’m sticking with Apple.