Apple's Customer Service Success

Creating Value

Apple's Customer Service Success

Apple's customer service success can be attributed to its operations management and supply chain management, as well as the synergies between these two.

Operations Management

Apple has a lineup of broad but connected products which makes for a rich customer experience. Apple is committed to make innovations and integrated products. Its products like the Macs, the iPod, iPhone, and ipad, are IT products that have been designed so that the customers can integrate them together easily.

Apple is able to do this by having an ecosystem of hardware that is connected by iOS,Mac OS X, its own software, and iTunes. Because of Apple's total control over its products it has been able to create other types of devices besides laptops and desktops.Apple's rigorously controlled retail experience is a credit to its operations management, and another source of its high customer satisfaction index. Apple has 300 stores worldwide. The whole retail experience is controlled including employee training, the range of products featured, the design of the stores, the tech support, and the educational classes offered for using Apple products(Les Galloway, 2012).

Supply Chain Management

Apple has an unconventional supply chain with its own pre-built advantages. This supply chain model makes demand management easier for Apple. It eliminates the need for Apple to get an accurate demand forecast for a new product.

Apple has the liberty to underestimate the demand for any of its new products, and in turn have loyal customers waiting for it. Because of Apple's projected backlog, it always has a huge lineup of customers on its stores waiting to buy its new products. This also facilitates marketing buzz.Because of this uncomplicated supply chain model, Apple has price advantages in manufacturing capacity,airfreight capacity,securing key components, and capital equipment(Wisner, 2011).

Marriot Customer Service Success

Operations Management

The credit for Marriott's customer loyalty completely goes to its operations management that is designed towards increasing customer satisfaction. Marriott implemented an ebusiness solution that manages customer touch points across every channel, establishes customer data that is unified and accessible to customer service employees, and offers a highly personalized experience to customers based on this rich customer profile.

Their ebusiness solution is part of Siebel eBusiness Applications that have a flexible architecture and are extremely user friendly. This ebusiness solution enables Marriott to embrace its customers in innovative ways. For example, Siebel eBusiness Applications makes the collection and consolidation