Service Process Design

Apple is Both a Goods and a Service.

You have the product in your hand and and use it but when you need help with something or it breaks the are customer service to help you with you Apple product.

Under the Service-Product Bundle I would put Apple under Physical (Facilitating) goods because you have a good that you can use.

Apple's Service Matrix would fall under the Semi-Standardized because when you need help the customer service is their for you but your question or problem has already been answered or seen before. All the service has to do is figure out what is wrong and fix the problem.

Apple's Customer Contact- You can contact Apple by e-mail or by phone but it's usually to set up an appointment to come into one of the Apple Stores to see what the problems to are having with one of your Apple products. Mainly Apple is a Face to Face but you do have the internet, phone contact, and mail contact as well. The only mail contact is if you are shipped a product via ordering one online, over the phone, or not in stock in the store.

Apple is all about the technology. What ever technology is coming out next apple puts it into their product and sells it. Just like the new iPad, its not much different from the laptop, iphone, and ipod. Its just like all three into one but their were thousands of people waiting for it when the iPad was released because people like new products that nobody has yet and that it why Apple is all about the newest technology

Apple's Service Quality

Apple wants to bring more repair in-house. the effort and expense necessary to keep hundreds of Apple dealers stocked with parts and reimbursed for warranty service is to costly. Plus, by bringing all repair work to a single location, Apple can more easily gather statistics on specific failures and figure out any commonalities in rare problems.

For Apple, there may be a downside to success. Sales are growing three times as fast as the overall PC market. Its iPod music player is burying the competition. And the stylish iPhone is setting the wireless industry on its head. But as Apple pulls in million more customers with different kids of products, it's getting harder to keep them all happy. "The customer base is now more diverse, including students and mainstream consumers, and it's harder to satisfy as a whole," Lopo L. Rego marketing Professor at the University of Iowa who studies customer satisfaction on financial performance.

Apple Inc. still tops all of the big measures of computer-customer service. But there are signs that it is vulnerable to the service struggle of other big companies. A widely watch study of customer satisfaction, Released in August, showed Apple slipping 4 points from last year's score, to 79 on a 100-point scale. That still leads the industry, but it's the company's first decline since 2001. Even though Apple sales are up the customer-service is becoming increasingly difficult because of the new customers Apple is attracting and with new customers its hard to please all of them.

Plus, not all those customers live close enough to get the vaunted high-touch service from an Apple store. For example. Michael Levin, a graduate student in Lubbock, Tex. bought a MacBook laptop. Several times it cracked on the area near its built-in mouse. but with no nearby Apple store, Levin had to make lengthy calls to Apple reps, who initially insisted he must have drooped the machine before they agreed to fix it.

Quality Decision- Quality Control and Improvement

Apple Inc designs and specs all their products and parts. All of the critical components are then supplied and manufactured by sole-sourced third-party vendors in the U.S., China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore. Sole-sourced third-party vendors in China perform final assembly of substantially all of the Company’s portable products, including MacBook Pro, MacBook, MacBook Air, iPods, iPhone, and most of the Company’s iMacs.


The quality control process used by the third party suppliers are outlined by Apple Inc in their Supplier Responsibility agreement. Random testing is done at different stages of the assembly of the part. Before an item is launched it is then sent to an independent performance evaluator company to ensure the product falls within the Apple Inc’s guidelines

One important note about Apple Inc is the fact they have very few issues with their computers. Any after product sale issue is addressed in Software updates, a knowledge base page, or through Apple care.

Quality Decision- Managing Quality

Quality of Design- Apple directs the customer to what they want with the newest technology avaiable that people can't get anywhere else. The inside story of why Apple's industrial-design has been so successful because it has made an art of not talking about its products.

Quality of Conformance- Apple is Technology orientated and all the employees need to know the newest technology on the market

Availability- With personal experience the Availability with apple is very good. I have had my MacBook for three years now and my MacBook has only been down for three days. 365/365+3=.9918, which is 99.18%

Apple is very quick to get a response to you with great customer service