I was at the Apple store yesterday picking up a new copy of Iwork and Ilife for my Apple notebook, and since I teach at CityU of Seattle, I wanted to use my educators 10% discount. Unfortunately, I do not have a school identity card, in lieu of not having a school id card; they allowed me to use the fact that there is a press release, and my name on the web site as the department head.

Customer service done right does not seem to happen all that often anymore, and the realization that I am generally surprised when a company actually does good customer service is not a good thing for companies overall. We expect the monolithic, we expect the “talk to yah later” routine, but that was not my experience at the Apple store in Bellevue Washington yesterday. I generally prefer to go to the Apple store because they have prices on the bottom of the packages, and I want to compare those to the online prices. This is a habit and something I do on a regular basis, if the deal is better online, I’ll default to ordering it online, but want to give stores a chance to compete within their own channels.

The problem cropped in when I wanted to use my education discount at the store, we do not have school identity cards so when the sales person asked, I had to tell them I didn’t bring anything that would prove I worked for CityU of Seattle. They checked to make sure that the school was in the database for Apple products (and even helped me out with finding the right zip code for the school), and when I could not produce an identity card or payroll stub, they asked if I had anything on the internet that would show I came from the school.

The store had internet access, and I pulled up the CityU of Seattle web site, and showed my name on an interview I did with curious office, and that made the sales person happy. I was going to go deeper, but the idea that there was an association between my name, and the school on the internet was all the proof that they wanted or needed to show that I worked at the school. The Apple sales person accepted a very unorthodox way of proving that I worked for the school, which means they get it.

We live in a reputation environment, where we are in many ways who we are online. Being able to show that there was a relationship between me and my place of work yesterday on the internet, and then having that approved, as a form of demonstrating association between company and person is a first for me. The cool part was that the sales person was completely happy with that association online when the more traditional association could not be proved at all.

This also shows the power of social networking as a form of identity and relationship, as it was an interview with Curious Office that we used to form a relationship between identity and association. In this case, it was good, as the sales person at the Apple store used the association to deliver a 10% discount on the software. While unorthodox and irregular, the Apple store sales person was very cool about the whole thing, and took the whole process in stride. They did not blink, they did not argue, they just processed the order based on the online association between identity and relationship.

Thanks Apple Store, thank you for a very fun experience with great customer service, even if we had to do things a bit unorthodoxly for a moment.

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