"Oh, I'm so sorry Mr. Godin, I'll see if I can get Frank to fix that". After which, of course, nothing is done anyway, but at least Mr. Godin feels like they care.
Or a middle ground: "I'm sorry Mr. Godin, I don't know if there's anything I can do to take care of that for you but I'll do what I can."
Merely acknowledging the problem, taking some responsiblity even by association changes the tone of the interaction. Especially considering they're asking him for a favor.
To tell the truth, if it is not some big organization, maybe it would be possible to do what was requested... Hard to tell without knowing anything about that though.
The best I can think of is the employee he's talking to calling over to the responsible dept noting the complaint (possibly with the customer on the phone), leaving a follow-up email, noting that as an issue with their own manager in whatever reporting they can do, and telling the customer "I'm very sorry sir. I don't have direct access to that myself, but I'll do my best to get ahold of the people who do, and to make sure that our management knows of the problem. Would you like me to follow-up with you on Wednesday?"
That said, I wasn't thinking so much of the situation he posed as the message he came away with. You don't get to be Apple by having a bunch of people in your organization taking shots at other parts of the organization. Of course the question now is do you still get to be Apple with the way they run the App Store.
Big companies are generally intolerant of bad behavior - if it's brought up. But in the absence of anybody shacking leaves to see, "why did Mr. Godin have a bad experience?" things just continue apace.
No, but surely they have a better chance of tracking that person down than Seth does, especially if they are asking him for a favour. It certainly wouldn't hurt to spend 15 minutes trying, or as others have said, say you will try. The main point is that blaming someone else inside your organisation to shift the blame from yourself is not cool.
