The same ethos provides similar results on the customer service side. For example, letting users go to the website and schedule a 15-minute window of time in w

The same ethos provides similar results on the customer service side. For example, letting users go to the website and schedule a 15-minute window of time in which Apple calls them is huge. Letting users go to the website and schedule an appointment to go talk to a real live human is huge. And making them walk all the way through a retail outlet full of your products to get there doesn't hurt, either. Every other company in their space is still stuck on figuring out how to distribute tech support resources to customers by asking them to wait on hold for an hour. That's an hour worth of time doing absolutely nothing productive that shows up on the 800 number's bill. That's a bunch more call center hardware to maintain in order to manage the queue of people on hold. That's less productivity per operator, because customers who are pissed off about being on hold for an hour are harder to work with, and because dealing with that for 8 hours a day is an excellent way to lose your own motivation. Let alone that a bad support experience is a good way to make sure a customer doesn't become a repeat customer.