A business executive makes a difficult confession when he endures what outrageous treatment at the hands of Google’s customer service is.
One of the simplest measures of a strong brand is how easily it earns forgiveness. For some, just a quick Our Father and Hail Mary will do. For others, uttering the whole rosary for ten hours a day won’t assuage the ire of a disappointed customer. Please, then, let me introduce you to Phil Grace. He’s the managing partner of MarketSignal.ai. He’s also a private equity investor. So he’s keen to have a working phone at all times. Grace contacted me in a state of, I judged from his words, exasperation. You see, he’d become so frustrated with Google that he’d penned what he called a confession. „It is difficult,“ he wrote, „when you have such a strong belief that it permeates everything in your life.“ No, you haven’t accidentally switched to the God Channel. Would you mind staying with me? „You feel you have all the facts and all the arguments on your side,“ Grace continued. „You feel like it is a true faith, maybe even a calling.“ Honestly, not the God Channel. Instead, Grace was channeling his absolute certainty that Google’s products were far better than Apple ’s. His primary apps, he said, were Google-made. Android gave those apps a better experience. Google’s maps, its phone cameras, its prices. This was a zealot. Whenever one of his kid’s friends asked him what phone he had, he’d offer a disquisition „as my daughter would take a deep breath and sit back and prepare herself for yet another dad diatribe as to why people who use the iPhone are stupid.“ Grace insists he didn’t use the word stupid. He merely meant it.
