6 ms·

It's great that this happened. It's annoying that it indicates the best way to get support from Apple is to make a prominent blog post.

ipp 10y ago
> It's annoying that it indicates the best way to get support from Apple is to make a prominent blog post. Posting somewhere public (for example, a company's social media page) to get support appears to be an increasing trend.
- viraptor 10y ago
  Which really means "we don't care if you're unhappy, we care if other people know you're unhappy" :(
  - wyldfire 10y ago
    Maybe instead of thinking of it as some sort of decline in service we should consider it as a net improvement in global communication. Media has democratized and you don't even need to convince the local TV news crew to cover your story anymore. You can just make a clear, coherent complaint in your own forum and occasionally [like in this case] it actually brings about a transformation. I doubt that Apple's customer service is any worse now than it was before.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      I'd like to think that is the case... When I was a child, we got a phone number that was one digit away from the number of a major hospital. That would have been bad enough, but Norway had area codes that covered very small areas at the time, and were optional within the area. Lots of people didn't remember the area code and so always used it, but would guess based on location of the person they dialled. The one digit difference was in the area code.. As a result we started getting calls about medical emergencies in the middle of the night. The local phone company did not see this as a problem either for us or the hospital or people calling with emergencies, but offered to put us on a waiting list (!) potentially for months before they could be bothered to change the number. Until my dad had hounded the reporters at the local newspaper until they wrote a piece about it - suddenly it was fixed within a day or two. So public attention worked back then too (this was early 80's) - there was just fewer outlets and more work to get your problems published. These days it doesn't take much before I go for social media. Another option I've found works (but is pricey) is to sign up (temporarily if you don't otherwise need it) for one of LinkedIn's premium tiers and use that to get access to top execs at the company you have an issue with. Often the issue is not so much to draw public attention, but that drawing public attention is the simplest way of getting the attention of and access to a senior enough executive.
      - viraptor 10y ago
        > Often the issue is not so much to draw public attention, but that drawing public attention is the simplest way of getting the attention of and access to a senior enough executive. I really believe that's true and wish it could be applied in more cases. Basically spread the problem to people who are normally not affected by it. I would bet that TSA queues would get solved in ~2 months if all government workers and politicians (to the highest position) were excluded from TSA precheck and could not pay for priority queues.
        vidarh 10y ago
        That's what spurred me to try LinkedIn when DHL messed me about - I'd had success getting issues solved when senior people happened to have their attention brought to my blog or whinin on Twitter, so I figured I'd try removing the middleman, at the cost of spending money instead. It was an interesting experience (especially as I got cc'd on some very interesting e-mails where people where told to fix my problem...). But that was a relatively easy situation that "just" required the attention of a couple of SVPs. Finding ways of drawing attention to more serious issues is a lot trickier.
    - byuu 10y ago
      > You can just make a clear, coherent complaint in your own forum and occasionally [like in this case] it actually brings about a transformation. But only if you have enough followers or readership. The Ars Technica writers have often remarked about feeling guilty for taking advantage of this privilege. They try to resolve things, then after failing, mention they're going to write a story about things, and suddenly get the VIP treatment. But not everyone can write an article for a major news site.
      - ctack 10y ago
        But you can tag their Twitter account.
        igravious 10y ago
        Does this always work? Is it going to be somebody's job to monitor all tagged tweets?
  - fenomas 10y ago
    I'd say it means that the social team monitoring twitter has more power to get shit done* than the CSRs manning the phones. *in this case meaning escalate to product teams or get the attention of executives
    - viraptor 10y ago
      Isn't that the same though? If you people who listen to you privately can do less than people who listen to your public statements, I think it goes back to my original argument. The company empowers people who can stop bad news rather than those who can make you happy.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    I wonder if it's part of a longer-term strategy to get people to ignore online complaints altogether. At some point, when it becomes commonplace to tweet about problems instead of calling, it'll be substantially more difficult for horror stories to "go viral". The more likely explanation is that PR teams are horrified at the prospect of something "going viral" and don't know how to tell what will and what won't, so they work to resolve any potential issue before it can blow up.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Or maybe: we care if it registers to our radar, because else we get tens of thousands of unhappy people complaining to us everyday -- and most are just ignorant of how it works, unhappy for no reason, have installed all kinds of crap and done custom changes that broke their system, etc.
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    Hasn't this always been the case? It's why the Better Business Bureau exists.
fenomas 10y ago
"Reaching out via social" seems to be the new "can I speak to a supervisor". True story - a month ago my credit card bill showed a mysterious $100 charge from Amazon. Phone support found the charge but couldn't figure out why it had been made, and eventually asked me to call my bank and dispute it(!!). That sounded like crazy talk, but rather than arguing I just said thanks and tweeted @amazon. Their social people referred me to someone who wound up figuring out how to cancel the charge.
- zaroth 10y ago
  Disputing the charge is the right thing to do in any case. Your CC company should make it very easy to login and mark the charge as problematic. They want to know if bad charges are coming in from the vendor, and this is the best way to track it. I personally don't think twice about disputing fraudulent or even mistaken charges. I can see how you might want to reserve this tool as an all-else-fails, but really CC companies should be appreciative of people using the tool because it gives them useful signals. Much better than the many many others who are missing the charge and paying for it by mistake.
  - eridius 10y ago
    Disputing a charge just because you don't immediately know what it is, is not a good idea. At least, not if you want to continue doing business with the vendor that made the charge. Companies tend to take a dim view of people issuing chargebacks.
    - zaroth 10y ago
      That's an interesting perspective. I take a dim view of companies charging my card incorrectly. Particularly Amazon since they submit many separate charges for items within a a single order, making it virtually impossible to verify the charges. I believe it is against the merchant agreement to withhold service after a valid charge-back. That would be a major and unwarranted retaliation, which you could probably sue and win a large class action if this is really happening. I will say, I should have made more clear, the first step in a dispute will be to contact the merchant. They will have a fixed number of days to reply and correct the problem.
djaychela 10y ago
Apple is not alone. I was an early ouya backer, and when mine arrived, it was water damaged (looked like it had been under water, not just rained on). The usual channels netted no response. I tweeted a photo with the text "I asked for shipping, not submarining", and got action within hours, and a replacement in days. Sad, but true.
jmuguy 10y ago
As an IT guy more and more often one of my roles is just to deal with the support people of a vendor so our clients don't have to. The larger a company is the harder it is to get anyone on the phone that gives a damn about your issue. Even better are companies that don't handle their own support, such as Polycom, who will kindly tell you to get bent and call some other company even after you've paid over 1k in renewal costs for a support contract. I've blogged or tweeted about HP, Ruckus, SonicWALL, Microsoft and probably some others. In each case I at least got to speak to someone that wasn't in a call center. At that point its usually some bizarro issue. For instance with HP they kept sending onsite techs to fix an issue who were literally lying about going out and fixing something - they weren't showing up. Or with Ruckus they wouldn't stop sending us replacement wireless access points and then couldn't figure out how we were supposed to send them back.
douche 10y ago
Not surprising that it's more effective than calling a phone support line that's typically at least two layers of outsourcing away from the company that you're trying to contact - and usually to some sort of high-churn, low-trained call center sweatshop[1]. The only thing less effective would possibly be trying to get help from a Microsoft/MSDN forum - "See this completely unrelated KB article for another product that doesn't work. Closed as resolved." [1] I write some software that gets used in call-centers... It's exactly as much fun dealing with them as your customers as when you are their customer.

ipp 10y ago

> It's annoying that it indicates the best way to get support from Apple is to make a prominent blog post. Posting somewhere public (for example, a company's social media page) to get support appears to be an increasing trend.

viraptor 10y ago
Which really means "we don't care if you're unhappy, we care if other people know you're unhappy" :(
- wyldfire 10y ago
  Maybe instead of thinking of it as some sort of decline in service we should consider it as a net improvement in global communication. Media has democratized and you don't even need to convince the local TV news crew to cover your story anymore. You can just make a clear, coherent complaint in your own forum and occasionally [like in this case] it actually brings about a transformation. I doubt that Apple's customer service is any worse now than it was before.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    I'd like to think that is the case... When I was a child, we got a phone number that was one digit away from the number of a major hospital. That would have been bad enough, but Norway had area codes that covered very small areas at the time, and were optional within the area. Lots of people didn't remember the area code and so always used it, but would guess based on location of the person they dialled. The one digit difference was in the area code.. As a result we started getting calls about medical emergencies in the middle of the night. The local phone company did not see this as a problem either for us or the hospital or people calling with emergencies, but offered to put us on a waiting list (!) potentially for months before they could be bothered to change the number. Until my dad had hounded the reporters at the local newspaper until they wrote a piece about it - suddenly it was fixed within a day or two. So public attention worked back then too (this was early 80's) - there was just fewer outlets and more work to get your problems published. These days it doesn't take much before I go for social media. Another option I've found works (but is pricey) is to sign up (temporarily if you don't otherwise need it) for one of LinkedIn's premium tiers and use that to get access to top execs at the company you have an issue with. Often the issue is not so much to draw public attention, but that drawing public attention is the simplest way of getting the attention of and access to a senior enough executive.
    - viraptor 10y ago
      > Often the issue is not so much to draw public attention, but that drawing public attention is the simplest way of getting the attention of and access to a senior enough executive. I really believe that's true and wish it could be applied in more cases. Basically spread the problem to people who are normally not affected by it. I would bet that TSA queues would get solved in ~2 months if all government workers and politicians (to the highest position) were excluded from TSA precheck and could not pay for priority queues.
      - vidarh 10y ago
        That's what spurred me to try LinkedIn when DHL messed me about - I'd had success getting issues solved when senior people happened to have their attention brought to my blog or whinin on Twitter, so I figured I'd try removing the middleman, at the cost of spending money instead. It was an interesting experience (especially as I got cc'd on some very interesting e-mails where people where told to fix my problem...). But that was a relatively easy situation that "just" required the attention of a couple of SVPs. Finding ways of drawing attention to more serious issues is a lot trickier.
  - byuu 10y ago
    > You can just make a clear, coherent complaint in your own forum and occasionally [like in this case] it actually brings about a transformation. But only if you have enough followers or readership. The Ars Technica writers have often remarked about feeling guilty for taking advantage of this privilege. They try to resolve things, then after failing, mention they're going to write a story about things, and suddenly get the VIP treatment. But not everyone can write an article for a major news site.
    - ctack 10y ago
      But you can tag their Twitter account.
      - igravious 10y ago
        Does this always work? Is it going to be somebody's job to monitor all tagged tweets?
- fenomas 10y ago
  I'd say it means that the social team monitoring twitter has more power to get shit done* than the CSRs manning the phones. *in this case meaning escalate to product teams or get the attention of executives
  - viraptor 10y ago
    Isn't that the same though? If you people who listen to you privately can do less than people who listen to your public statements, I think it goes back to my original argument. The company empowers people who can stop bad news rather than those who can make you happy.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  I wonder if it's part of a longer-term strategy to get people to ignore online complaints altogether. At some point, when it becomes commonplace to tweet about problems instead of calling, it'll be substantially more difficult for horror stories to "go viral". The more likely explanation is that PR teams are horrified at the prospect of something "going viral" and don't know how to tell what will and what won't, so they work to resolve any potential issue before it can blow up.
- coldtea 10y ago
  Or maybe: we care if it registers to our radar, because else we get tens of thousands of unhappy people complaining to us everyday -- and most are just ignorant of how it works, unhappy for no reason, have installed all kinds of crap and done custom changes that broke their system, etc.
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  Hasn't this always been the case? It's why the Better Business Bureau exists.

fenomas 10y ago

"Reaching out via social" seems to be the new "can I speak to a supervisor". True story - a month ago my credit card bill showed a mysterious $100 charge from Amazon. Phone support found the charge but couldn't figure out why it had been made, and eventually asked me to call my bank and dispute it(!!). That sounded like crazy talk, but rather than arguing I just said thanks and tweeted @amazon. Their social people referred me to someone who wound up figuring out how to cancel the charge.

zaroth 10y ago
Disputing the charge is the right thing to do in any case. Your CC company should make it very easy to login and mark the charge as problematic. They want to know if bad charges are coming in from the vendor, and this is the best way to track it. I personally don't think twice about disputing fraudulent or even mistaken charges. I can see how you might want to reserve this tool as an all-else-fails, but really CC companies should be appreciative of people using the tool because it gives them useful signals. Much better than the many many others who are missing the charge and paying for it by mistake.
- eridius 10y ago
  Disputing a charge just because you don't immediately know what it is, is not a good idea. At least, not if you want to continue doing business with the vendor that made the charge. Companies tend to take a dim view of people issuing chargebacks.
  - zaroth 10y ago
    That's an interesting perspective. I take a dim view of companies charging my card incorrectly. Particularly Amazon since they submit many separate charges for items within a a single order, making it virtually impossible to verify the charges. I believe it is against the merchant agreement to withhold service after a valid charge-back. That would be a major and unwarranted retaliation, which you could probably sue and win a large class action if this is really happening. I will say, I should have made more clear, the first step in a dispute will be to contact the merchant. They will have a fixed number of days to reply and correct the problem.

djaychela 10y ago

Apple is not alone. I was an early ouya backer, and when mine arrived, it was water damaged (looked like it had been under water, not just rained on). The usual channels netted no response. I tweeted a photo with the text "I asked for shipping, not submarining", and got action within hours, and a replacement in days. Sad, but true.

jmuguy 10y ago

As an IT guy more and more often one of my roles is just to deal with the support people of a vendor so our clients don't have to. The larger a company is the harder it is to get anyone on the phone that gives a damn about your issue. Even better are companies that don't handle their own support, such as Polycom, who will kindly tell you to get bent and call some other company even after you've paid over 1k in renewal costs for a support contract. I've blogged or tweeted about HP, Ruckus, SonicWALL, Microsoft and probably some others. In each case I at least got to speak to someone that wasn't in a call center. At that point its usually some bizarro issue. For instance with HP they kept sending onsite techs to fix an issue who were literally lying about going out and fixing something - they weren't showing up. Or with Ruckus they wouldn't stop sending us replacement wireless access points and then couldn't figure out how we were supposed to send them back.

douche 10y ago

Not surprising that it's more effective than calling a phone support line that's typically at least two layers of outsourcing away from the company that you're trying to contact - and usually to some sort of high-churn, low-trained call center sweatshop[1]. The only thing less effective would possibly be trying to get help from a Microsoft/MSDN forum - "See this completely unrelated KB article for another product that doesn't work. Closed as resolved." [1] I write some software that gets used in call-centers... It's exactly as much fun dealing with them as your customers as when you are their customer.