Home Media makes a difference with Mac

Mac users tend to be strong advocates for their "better" computers, but one innovative CEO here in Richmond has improved his customer service by just using a Macintosh.

Ray Lepper built Home Media to provide beautiful, elegant, and really fun solutions to whole house music systems and networks, the best home theater installations and top-notch service after the install. He and his staff have been using Macs at the store for years, but when Mac OS X came along with Cover Flow as part of Finder, Ray had a brilliant idea.

Custom audio visual systems put together by experts like Home Media are awesome to watch, listen and use, but the setup and maintenance can be very complicated. When you have someone like Ray design and build a system for you, they not only install and hook up the various receivers, projectors, speakers, amplifiers and players for you, they also do all the complex programming so you just get the fun, use-it part of the deal. That still leaves a daunting support issue, though, with each install being a custom creation from dozens and dozens of pieces of high tech gear.

Well, Ray and his Macintosh-powered team have come up with a great solution. Once he saw the Cover Flow motif in the Finder window on Leopard, one of the recent Mac operating system releases, he knew he could use the iPod-like document browser to quickly catalog invoices, instructions and manuals.

Each and every document related to a customer's installation is scanned to an Adobe PDF document and all the equipment and programming manuals are saved in the same format to a customer-specific folder on their network drive.

When a support call comes in or when that customer calls up to upgrade their wireless router or add a Blu-Ray DVD player, the Home Media staffer just opens the right folder and can flip through a fully-rendered, smaller version of all the documents used in that customer's house. Within seconds and without leaving their desk, Ray's team has all the information about that system and can answer questions quickly and correctly.

That means Home Media can not only design and install the best AV systems, they are also well prepared for providing the best support and in-house customer service. A great differentiator and customer benefit without spending any extra on their computers and I.T.

I've seen many a Mac user smile when they work on their computers, but Ray has figured out how to keep his customers smiling because he's using a Mac. Genius!