Apple's New SVP of Retail Went Undercover as Regular Salesperson
Apple CEO Tim Cook earlier this week explained that new Apple's new Senior Vice President of Retail, John Browett, was hired not to "bring Dixons to Apple", but instead "to bring Apple to an even higher level of customer service and satisfaction." In the initial press release announcing the hire, Cook went even further, saying that "John shares that commitment [to customer service] like no one else we’ve met."
Showcasing part of John Browett's dedication to customer service, MacRumors reader Paul Harmer passed along this story of a run-in he had with Browett in the UK:
Just a quick note about John Browett -
About a year ago I was with a friend in our local branch of PC World (part of the Dixons group) looking at plasma TVs. We were assisted by a really charming and knowledgable assistant, who I must admit appeared slightly better-dressed and older than most in the store. He must have spent at least 30 minutes with us, explaining the pros and cons of LCD vs plasma, and the best deals available. An excellent impression.
Turns out it was John Browett making one of his regular store visits, but we had to prise this out of him.
Hope he does well, genuinely impressive bloke, and this ties in with your comment about his passion for customer service. He means it!
Paul
In another example of how Browett may be a better fit for Apple than previously realized, Mr. Harmer emailed Dixons Group to share the story of his experience and received an email back from CEO John Browett himself:
Dear Paul,
Thank you for your kind comments.
Hope the TV works out well.
Happy new year
John
When Steve Jobs was CEO, he was known to occasionally respond to customer emails directly. Since he became CEO, Tim Cook has been doing the same.
John Browett begins at Apple in April.
Popular Stories
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
There are widespread reports of Apple users being locked out of their Apple ID overnight for no apparent reason, requiring a password reset before they can log in again. Users say the sudden inexplicable Apple ID sign-out is occurring across multiple devices. When they attempt to sign in again they are locked out of their account and asked to reset their password in order to regain access. ...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
Apple used to regularly increase the base memory of its Macs up until 2011, the same year Tim Cook was appointed CEO, charts posted on Mastodon by David Schaub show. Earlier this year, Schaub generated two charts: One showing the base memory capacities of Apple's all-in-one Macs from 1984 onwards, and a second depicting Apple's consumer laptop base RAM from 1999 onwards. Both charts were...
Top Rated Comments
You're actually that arrogantly stupid to think that there's UK members of this forum venting about how bad Dixons is because we're "jealous" that a UK citizen has left for America? Seriously? You're THAT unintelligent that you genuinely think that this whole "debate" is down to Brits being "annoyed" at America "stealing" a Brit?
Get over yourself, seriously, and do it as quick as possible before your delusions of grandeur warp your concept of life any further.
It's nothing to do with people being jealous that he left the UK and a lot of us here can't. The FACT, and it remains FACT, is that Dixons/PC World is/was a hellhole of a company and their stores are abysmal shopping experiences and were BEFORE, during, and AFTER this blokes tenure as CEO.
And, for an American, you're awfully smug about the debt situation in the EuroZone/UK when your own country contributes to the vast majority of world debt and your dodgy banks and their paper thin mortgage deals and lending promises brought the world economy to the biggest credit crunch since the depression.
Don't bother replying ...
My rational brain is therefore wanting to totally call BS.
Dixons is an awful shop and always has been. I don't care what people write about the guy, us Brits have years of experience in poor quality Dixons, Currys and PC World. They are all utterly awful.