An Inside Look at Apple's Genius Training Manual

Gizmodo managed to obtain a complete copy of manual for Apples’s Genius training program. The manual describes the two-week training new Geniuses go through, along with detailed information on how to handle customer service issues, how to empathize with customers to build a relationship, recognizing body language and other cues to help understand each customer's emotions and guide the interaction to a resolution.

The manual could easily serve as the Humanity 101 textbook for a robot university, but at Apple, it's an exhaustive manual to understanding customers and making them happy. Sales, it turns out, take a backseat to good vibes—almost the entire volume is dedicated to empathizing, consoling, cheering up, and correcting various Genius Bar confrontations. The assumption, it'd seem, is that a happy customer is a customer who will buy things. And no matter how much the Apple Store comes off as some kind of smiling likeminded computer commune, it's still a store above all—just one that puts an enormous amount of effort behind getting inside your head.

The manual also contains a list of things Geniuses are not allowed to say. Geniuses can say that an application "unexpectedly quits" or "does not respond," but are not allowed to say that the software "crashed." Similarly, there can be a "condition," an "issue" or a "situation," but not a "bug" or a "problem."