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.
