I’m heading out from WFX to fly back home, but before I do I wanted to provide a free download of my two sessions:

Essential Management Skills for Technical Directors

Embracing the Digital Culture

I’ve got a LOT - wow, a whole lot - to share from this week, but that’ll have to wait until I have some time & am not exhausted! In the meantime, keep up with my stream of consciousness on Twitter.com/anthonycoppedge.

Apple came through by pushing my unit through some pretty impressive hoops and got my new (replacement to my broken MacBook Pro) MacBook Pro to me the day before I head out to WFX in California! Yes, I’m happy, but this is a great lesson in several things that apply to anyone at any organization.

Here’s the three takeaways for Apple or any organization that wants a loyal clientele:

• Communicate between departments (or ministries)
• Don’t let the “Standard Procedure” get in the way of highly unique situations
• Customer Service (or a hospitality/greeting ministry) matters more than you think

When Apple Care learned of their mistake, they first tried to simply follow standard procedure and told me, in essence, “we’re sorry, we messed up, but there’s nothing we can do about it”. But with persistence, it turns out that, yes, there’s a highly unusual way for them to work between departments, clarify some procedure (and hopefully follow up with some internal training) and make the situation right.

Because departments (or ministries) are filled with people, the standard operating procedure is in place to make the typical stuff flow smoothly. But the atypical stuff needs to be addressed by people, not policy. Making the atypical situation custom requires a bit more effort but, in the end, a raving fan of their can-do attitude and someone that now has a better story to tell my friends than the one of the failure on Apple’s part.

Because a couple of key people took some extra time, I was taken care of and my needs were met. They righted the wrong of their system and have gone above-and-beyond to make things work out right. That is great customer service! In the same way, when someone has an issue at church, giving them pat answers isn’t going to solve anything. Instead, because we’re all about people in church (a great tag line, by the way - kudos to Gateway Church), people help with situations and people (leaders) do our best to right any wrongs.

With social media like Facebook and Twitter becoming common-place, we either can let the negative story be told or a highly positive one that does even more good to our reputation.

Today, everyone has a voice. They will be heard. Do your best to help them tell a great story, not a negative one.

In my last post, I talked about how Apple Care misinformed me about the actual shipping date of my replacement MacBook Pro 17″. Fortunately, I had a recommendation from one of the Apple Care techs to downloaded a shareware version of Carbon Copy Cloner. This software has literally saved my presentations and computing for next week!

By making a true clone back-up of my MacBook Pro hard drive, I’m able to use my wife’s MacBook and boot from my back-up hard drive. The result? I’m working on my Mac again by using the hardware of my wife’s MacBook.

When I’m back from my trip I’ll be able to boot my new MacBook Pro from the back-up drive and simply use Carbon Copy Cloner in reverse to put my back-up onto the new hard drive. Once complete, I simply reboot the new Mac from the internal hard drive and I’m literally using my old Mac - programs, preferences, passwords and all - on new hardware.

On a PC, I’d be out of luck AND spending hours and hours installing software and transferring files.

As a result of this misadventure, I’m making a STRONG recommendation for churches to use Carbon Copy Cloner on ALL of their production Macs as a way to have a real back-up to boot from in case of a simple hard drive failure. Using Firewire 400 or 800 from an external 7200 RPM drive will ensure fast playback of even video loops in software such as Pro Video Player and ProPresenter.

I simply can’t say enough good things about Carbon Copy Cloner! This is MUST HAVE software for your Mac!