Customer service and sales is apparently is A-OK if done by any other company, but if done by Apple suddenly it's "manipulating customers?". Absolute hogwash.

I learned the same techniques working at Radio Shack and EB Games, and no one there accused me of 'manipulating customers'. I think what a lot of people miss is that if you 'manipulate' someone into buying what they don't want or what isn't right for them, then at the best case you've lost a return customer and all their associated referrals, and at the worst case, you'll have a return to deal with, as well as a lost return customer and referrals, plus a negative reputation with them and their friends.

Sales, good sales anyway, isn't about tricking someone into buying your product. It's about finding out what it is that they really need (not what they think they need, or what they want), and providing that to them first. Sometimes that does mean upselling them to a better system. Sometimes it means downselling them to a cheaper system with upgrades. If someone is mostly going to work at home with an external monitor, and they're mostly going to use Aperture or Lightroom, a 13" Macbook Pro with 8 GB of RAM may be better than a 15" Macbook Pro with 4 GB of RAM. If it's an iMac for a classroom, a larger screen will be better so more people can see what's happening at once.

Best Buy (and other customer-hostile stores) do this by convincing people not to buy Macs, opting instead for Windows laptops that will need more maintenance (upselling them with service packages, Geek Squad, etc). That's the sort of 'manipulation' that people associate with sales, and it's really too bad.

Thanks for the comment and listening to my feedback. And thanks for "giving it!"

  Customer: This Mac is just too expensive.*
  Genius: I can see how you'd feel this way. I felt the
    price was a little high, but I found it's a real value
    because of all the built-in software and capabilities.

  [from the OP:]  This tactic dovetails nicely with the section of the
    manual on things to avoid saying and doing. For
   instance: “Do not apologize for the business [or] the
    technology.” Instead, empathize: “I’m sorry you’re
    feeling frustrated,” or “too bad about your soda spill 
    accident.”

If a salesperson is good at their job, you walk away thinking that you came to the decision yourself without any coercion at all.

And I would read them as standard sales technique. "Feel, felt, found" or "the three F's" is well known.

The genius thought it was really cool that I am a programmer and I was developing apps :-).

Mind you, I had not even gotten to the genius bar at this point and they had not even looked at the white stickers inside the phone and socket to look for water damage.

Looking up my name also would have indicated I too had spent thousands on apple products.

I had to fight and claw my way through multiple managers and then multiple people at the genius bar before I finally got my phone replaced, and in the end, the way the replacement phone was issued to me was almost like I was being given hush money to shut up and go away. It was pretty ridiculous and extremely unprofessional.

It's not even my worst experience at an Apple Store, which says a lot.

I'm still a big fan of Apple's products, but not a fan at all of the Apple Store, and it is unlikely I will ever step foot in one again after what I've had to endure.

Then again, this all happened in Australia, and our standards with customer service are noticeably much, much lower than in America, so maybe that had something to do with it and the Apple Stores in America do have the excellent customer service I keep hearing about

Unfortunately over here in Australia, I suspect it is just the general state of any industry involving customer service.

When going to many of the restaurants in Sydney it is extremely rare to experience the kind of customer service which you take for granted over there. We don't do tipping, so that probably explains that.

There are no shortage of apple geeks in Sydney. Theres two Apple Stores in Sydney now as a matter of fact - both on George St (the main street that goes through the Sydney CBD)!

Sydney is a lot like SFO was to me in the sense that its impossible to go out in public for more than a couple of minutes without seeing somebody using an apple product!

For whatever reason though, it seems that Apple Australia keeps hiring the people who really don't show a great deal of passion in Apple at all (or people for that matter)

I'm sure theres plenty of good people working at the Apple stores around Australia, unfortunately I always seem to get the opposite, perhaps I'm just extremely unlucky, but I feel its gone well past that point now.

Details at 10.

Original article: http://gizmodo.com/5938323/how-to-be-a-genius-this-is-apples...