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March 07, 2005
Making Apple's Genius Bar smarter
Seth has several ideas how Jobs & Co. can improve the Genius Bar experience at Apple retail stores for customers.
Making the iPod diagnostic tool self-serve would be a big help. That could have saved me an hour last year waiting for a genius to do what I could have done myself in a few minutes at a self-serve kiosk.
Waiting for a genius can take time; I'd love to fill that time by checking email or surfing, but the store's Internet-enabled Macs are in the opposite corner from the Genius Bar (in the Chicago Michigan Ave. location) and are consistently taken by what often appears to be non-customers.
Apple might take issue with Seth's point that it doesn't differentiate the $10,000 customers from the $300 ones and point toward its Pro Care program as evidence. Knowing that most warranty and service programs are huge profit centers for companies, I politely declined my Apple store's offer to sign up for Pro Care because I expect my new Powerbook to work for more than a year.
As a luxury technology company, I'd love to see Apple adopt a practice luxury car makers use: longer warranties. From a customer's perspective, how insanely great would a 3-year or 5-year warranty be?
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I think that you meant "Extended" warranty and service programs are huge profit centers.
Standard warranty programs draw their funding from the sale price of the product. Accordingly, Apple would have to build in higher prices not only to compensate for 3 years of warranty repairs, but lost revenue from extended warranties and the cost of higher quality components to prevent failures.
I think that you meant "Extended" warranty and service programs are huge profit centers.
Standard warranty programs draw their funding from the sale price of the product. Accordingly, Apple would have to build in higher prices not only to compensate for 3 years of warranty repairs, but lost revenue from extended warranties and the cost of higher quality components to prevent failures.
Joe, you could say that again. Oh wait, I guess you did.
Just to clarify: Extended-warranty purchase programs is the intent. I'm glad Joe pointed that out.
But I still think companies, especially technology companies that build high-end products (like Apple), can do a much better job of warranting their work.
To Joe's other point about extended warranties and better components being responsible for higher costs... has anyone seen economic models that study cost-benefit ratios between short-term warranties vs. longer-term systems and their effects on top-line revenue growth and customer acquisition and retention?
Ben, I'm betting that any such studies would be filled with largely speculative or simply made up numbers. Tracking customer retention, and satisfaction is extremely hard and usually requires relying on customers honest feedback.
Considering that Apple's gross margins on most machines are right around the cost of Applecare for the same machines, I'm betting the numbers have been crunched on this and it didn't add up.
