BRAND INTEGRITY= GREAT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

There are two completely different sides to the concept of integrity.  On the one hand integrity depicts the quality of being honest, and built on solid moral principles.  On the other hand integrity denotes the state of being whole and undivided, obtaining cohesiveness in all its details.  Nowhere do these two seemingly separate qualities come together more effectively than in defining the ultimate customer experience. 

Hadi, my husband’s BMW sales person, omniscient but never obvious, careful of every detail in the buying and service experience, keeper of the BMW brand and champion of its emotional and rigorous qualities, but also direct, truthful, and earnest as he explains how that engine part will really take ten days to get to Boston.  Really.  Ten days.  But that is what it was, and he was right.

A great customer experience is awesome in its details, clear in its purpose, honest in its message.  The antonym:  The Mass Registry of Motor Vehicles.  Not even the name is honest.  That is not what it does.  It’s not about being a registry, it’s about being a container for frustrated people who need to wait for hours in a crowded dusty space, for information that should be available on line. The only thing you find on line?  An estimate of the average waiting time, which is so NOT what you find when you get there.

A great customer experience reinforces the brand in ways that are consistent, but often feel surprising, perhaps even insignificant – at least until you really think about it.  To many of us suspicious customers, the Apple brand brings up concerns.  It could not possibly be this good.  The experience, no way it is really as seamless as it seems.  Down to the Genius Bar at the Apple store.  What, a friendly and truly happy customer service representative?  Impossible, and yet it is true.

Perhaps nowhere has the Apple brand been so surprisingly, and uncompromisingly reinforced as in its decisions on iOS 8 and data privacy: “At Apple, your trust means everything to us. That’s why we respect your privacy and protect it with strong encryption, plus strict policies that govern how all data is handled.”  This is how Tim Cook’s commitment to privacy begins.  And surprisingly, the commitment ends with Apple actually delivering on its promise, driving Cook’s holistic vision in its details.  Privacy is an important pillar of the iOS8 software. Multiple new features are designed to grant customers greater control over their privacy, how third-party applications track information about them, and how personal information is treated. A sampling of this functionality includes:

§  New settings allow users to restrict apps from determining their location unless the app is in active use, preventing apps from collecting location data in the background unless explicitly authorized to do so

§  An ability to see and modify an app's individual privacy settings on an app-by-app basis

§  A notification to a user that an app is using their location in the background with a new, brightly colored, double-height status bar

§  Apps that have permanent access to the users’ location will occasionally re-prompt users for access to their location

§  Randomized MAC addresses make it harder for networks to track devices

§  Developers are required to tell users why their apps need location data when asking for permission to do so

§  iOS 8 allows app developers to request access to only a selected contact instead of having to request access to access to a user’s entire Contacts list

§  HealthKit data is secure, cannot be sold to advertisers and permissions work on a per-app, per-data type

§  A new Safari third-party cookie policy includes option to block all third-party cookies on the Safari browser regardless of whether the user has visited the site previously

Apple delivers on its privacy promise with honesty in its details, and the brand and customer experience is reinforced, yet again, in new and unexpected ways.  The phone actually actively notifies you when privacy data is being used.  Did we expect that? Not me.  And this is why I love it even more. Integrity rules.