Baton Rouge Mall of LA Apple Store Support Service
I just finished up a meeting with the Genius Bar at the BR Mall of LA Apple Store and was disappointed by the experience. Although my question was answered, and my problem fixed, I feel it is my obligation to let others know Apple Store service can be much better and even impressive. Needless to say, my BR experience leaves me wondering what happened here. I've been to several other Apple Stores in the US, mainly Cali, and had great experiences and left feeling as though I've learned something new and was still satisfied with investing with Apple. I'd like to know from others in Louisiana how their service experience rated and whether this was just a "one-off" experience on bad day in the store.
Let me explain why the experience was disappointing. My appointment was at 11:45 am. I checked in at the front door around 11:34 am and was instructed to wait in the store and someone would approach me. That's fine, so I browsed through all the new gadgets. 20 minutes after my scheduled time, 12:05 pm, someone approached me asking whether I had an appointment and whether I'd checked in, to which I confirmed the 11:45 am appointment. Not a problem, it was a busy day. But more than half the people in the store had on red shirts and were talking to each other, not customers. I could easily tell the hierarchy of the employees, and noticed as a guy with a black shirt strolled through the store, one of the mid-aged male employee who was earlier trying to direct others, perked up and asked a female customer whether she needed to check out. Total brown nosing. So when I get to the Genius Bar a few minutes later, the "Genius" I'm asked to talk to left me wondering if the title is appropriate. Now sure, everyone has a sweet spot and is better at something than me, but if your advertising that your a "Genius" at something, I'd expect it to be somewhat obvious. Well, she was polite and courteous, but she didn't know much, so expectedly, she asked a more experienced male who drove the keyboard without much interaction with her or me and quickly downloaded Grand Perspective and solved the problem. There was not much verbal communication between the Apple employees and the customers. They were busy discussing amongst themselves where they were going for New Year's Eve, and how bad the hangover would be the next morning. And again I'm questioning the name of the stool. So anyway, I try to have discussions with the female and male employee to get some nuggets of information that could help with the Mac, but to no avail, they just blankly stared at me. I asked some questions about remote storage, backups, wifi's and Apple TV, but was not asked what I wanted the ultimate thing to do for me. Anyway, my problem was solved and we left the store, but my experience did not leave me feeling impressed. If this is the norm for customer service here in BR LA, let me tell others that's not the case everywhere.
Just wondering how your BR Apple Store service experience rated? I would have given this experience a 2 out of 5 rating.
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.2)