Apple Card’s best feature? Text messaging
You may have heard: Last autumn, Apple launched a credit card.
This in itself is not that remarkable —can you name a large corporation that doesn’t have a branded credit card to encourage loyalty?
They’ve launched some questionable recent endeavors (A news subscription that only carries magazines? The umpteenth television streaming service?), but don’t lump the Card in with the rest.
The Apple Card is Apple at its best.
Here’s when Apple shines:
There is an everyday experience that people hate. (MP3 players // smartphones // credit cards)
Apple pulls strings and pressures incumbents to agree to its vision. (music labels // cellular carriers // banks)
Apple enters the game late, with a user experience like no other. (iPod // iPhone // Apple Card)
There are a few aspects of Apple Card worth writing about. The titanium card. The privacy protections. The points-free rewards system. Goldman Sachs’ first foray into consumer credit cards. The app that helps educate cardholders about how interest works, and how to avoid it.
But the program’s least flashy feature is perhaps the most transferrable skill to almost every other business: Native iMessage support.
This is no janky browser chat window. Implemented through Apple’s iMessage Business Chat, your one message thread with Apple is integrated not just into the native iOS Messages app, but also across departments at Apple and its credit card partners.
No hold times. No “cold” handoffs. No browser windows. No chat bots. (Well, aside from an occasional initial routing question.)
There’s no chat thread for Apple Card, versus Apple Sales, or Apple Support. The contact simply appears as “Apple”.
Take my recent experience:
I messaged Apple with a question about scheduled payments.
I was greeted promptly, and told that I was being connected with someone at Goldman Sachs for my particular question.
Within seconds, in the same thread, a Sachs employee addressed my question.
I didn’t have to call a specific number. I didn’t wait on hold. I didn’t repeat any of my information. I just asked for help, once, and got everything addressed within five minutes total. Wonderful. Frankly, it’s tough to imagine going back to the way other support organizations work.
The first time I experienced support staff this well-equipped was Warby Parker’s SMS support. That is impressive, but Business Chat is a next-level, total orientation of multiple corporations around customer needs.
It’s easy to underestimate the amount of internal work that it must have taken to achieve this kind of experience.
Request routing. Managing expectations. Employee training, across 2-3 separate companies. Equipping support staff with resources to act quickly.
A lot of times, reducing complexity for customers means taking on the burden of that complexity yourself, whether through your technology or your staff. It’s an investment that, in this case quite literally, pays off for everyone.
This was originally commissioned for Fjord's Design Voices.