“Today, brands must consistently earn the right to be chosen by proving value to their customers.”
McKinsey said it. Every brand knows it. Customer loyalty has never been more important—or harder to maintain. So, what’s the secret to maintaining it?
Simple. Love.
Why the Apple Stores ‘loved’ customers
The iMac was a cult hit as of its release in 1997. However, it didn’t truly accomplish Steve Jobs’s goal for it, which was to reach a new customer. Steve knew that for Apple to win, he had to control the customer experience at the point of sale. I had the privilege of leading this effort. And to win on the customer experience, I decided the Apple Stores would focus on service.
Steve asked me to articulate our service philosophy in four words or less. I came back with “love customers.” Love, as I understood it from the Bible, was an act of securing the good of another person. But Steve pushed back, noting Cupertino’s secularity.
“Can you use a different word?” he asked.
I landed on “enrich lives.” Working with our team, I developed a set of steps employees could take to do it: approach with a warm welcome, probe to understand needs, listen for unresolved concerns, and end with a fond farewell.
That combination led to what some have described as cult-like customer loyalty.
What ‘enriching lives’ looked like in practice
In 2003, an author came into Apple Soho with a broken Windows PC. She had a deadline. She needed a computer today.
A less empowered employee—one operating from a script—would’ve seen that urgency as an opening to push a sale. Instead, the specialist asked her a different question: Wouldn’t it be easier to finish your book on one of our computers while yours gets repaired?
She lit up. And for the next 30 days, she showed up.
I don’t know what happened with the book. But I know what happened to her perception of Apple.
That’s what “enriching lives” looked like in practice—not a script, but an empowered employee. Someone with room to ask what does this person actually need?
The small moments that compounded into something big
I used to ask store leaders what their stores were going to be famous for. The answers were small, but they added up.
One leader found a better approach to attaching AppleCare when every store was struggling with it. Another discovered that morning yoga sessions got their team ready for the day. Some stores started carrying customers’ computers to their cars.
Then there was Duke Zurek, my Minnesota store leader, who noticed that some customers wanted their computers set up. That observation became Personal Setup—an initiative that eventually rolled out across every store, every product.
None of these came from corporate directives. They came from people who understood the mission well enough to pursue it creatively.
The data point that reframed how we understood loyalty
In 2007, just before the iPhone launch, Fred Reichheld invented Net Promoter Score, and we were one of the first retailers to implement it. We used it to ask customers how likely they were to recommend the Apple Store. The initial findings were predictable: Good experiences drove recommendations, bad ones didn’t.
But then I tried something. When a customer had a bad experience, I’d reply to tell them we were sorry, and copy the store leader. I did this because it felt like the right thing to do, and our store leaders did what I expected and followed up to solve the customer’s issue. But they also did it immediately. This led to a surprising data point.
Customers who had a bad experience addressed quickly were seven times as likely to recommend us as customers who simply had a good experience.
Read that again. A rapidly resolved complaint outperformed a seamless interaction—by 7x.
Delivering a great experience made customers happy. Addressing a failure made them loyal. Those are not the same thing.
What this means for your culture
Here’s the counterintuitive part: None of this works if your people are afraid to make mistakes.
The reason the author in SoHo got an invitation to use a floor computer—or that Duke’s team began setting up computers—is that our employees were free to try things. They weren’t operating from a rule book. They understood the mission, and the mission gave them permission to exercise their judgment.
That’s what a healthy culture looks like. Not one where everyone follows the script. One where people are free to take risks in pursuit of something they genuinely believe in.
When I left Apple in 2011, I hoped people associated our stores with employees who knew what to do for a customer not because they were listening to rules, but because they were listening to themselves. There’s something qualitatively different about interacting with someone who has the power to actually help you versus someone reading from a script. People know the difference. And they will always be more loyal to the former.
The actual secret
My focus on service was probably shaped by how I was raised. My parents encouraged my siblings and me to volunteer, to shovel snow off our neighbor’s driveway after her husband died, to focus on others.
Maybe that’s why I told Steve we were going to love our customers. Maybe that’s why, when he pushed back, I found a different way to say the same thing.
But here’s what I know for certain: Love creates loyalty. We figured that out starting in 2001.
Everyone else can start acting on it now.
