Have you ever had a customer service experience so great that you wanted to find the department, seek out your service agents, pet their heads and bring them candies? No? Well, simply order print material via one of the Apple applications and get ready to pony up some sugary sweets, yo.

Yes I work for Apple. Does that matter for this article? No. I don’t work for print services so get over it.

Having recently been married, I was putting together the wedding photo album. I don’t use iPhoto for editing, but for book compilation purposes, I’ve found it excellent in the past. So I drag and dropped my chosen photos into the application and selected the ‘book’ icon at the bottom of the photos view window to get into the book editor view.

iPhoto book editor is stupid easy.

Using the obvious icons at the bottom of the screen along with the drop down menus, I easily created an awesome album and clicked the ‘buy book’ button to get to the purchase screen. They had my Apple ID information already stored in there that I use to purchase iTunes media and I altered my delivery address to go to work. With a timely confirmation email, I was good to go.

And then there were books…

The books were delivered to my office with ease a mere two days later. I opened them and started showing them off to my office mates, when much to my surprise, one of the books fell out of it’s binding. Booooooo. I started testing all the books because I had intended to send them to family for Xmas presents. Two of the books hadn’t been properly attached to the binding. It looked like it wasn’t fully pushed into the glue.

I was loathe to contact customer service.

I rarely have pleasant customer service encounters, so I was not looking forward to getting into it. However, I needed these soon, so I emailed the iPhoto print services email address I found by searching the Apple site. I attached photos of the books and explained that I was time constrained and would appreciate any help they could give me.

They deserve puppies.

I ended up going back and forth twice with two different people because one went on holidays shortly after picking up my support ticket. Both were lovely and gracious. They emailed back quickly and didn’t use form letters (or were better at faking it then most). They apologized for the quality and sent me replacements within three days and even tagged on some bonus copies because it was my wedding album. It was so easy I was stunned. It really solidified my choice to use Apple photo printing over other services because the UI to Customer Service experience was so nice and easy. Go team!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Software to Real Life. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.