Terrible Times in Apple Land

DrunkAndRetired.com listener and super-fan, Aaron “jomdom” Ransley, has been having a terrible time getting a MacBook that works. His hardware has been defective, turn-around time has taken almost a month, and they’ve yet to fix his problem, sending back the box with the same problem or with new problems.

Now he’s stuck in quite the pickle:

What the hell am I expected to do at this point? I love OS X, I love the whole Apple design mantra, and I loved the hardware itself, but what now? Send it in again for another 1-3 weeks of repair? Re-install all my Web apps on my Windows box? Get a refund, and end up with more than $500 of Mac-only software? Get a replacement and end up with another lemon?

I would expect the above from a cheap segment like Dell. But, when you pay the Apple premium, you’re getting ripped off if you get crappy service like the above. Part of paying so much above Dell and even ThinkPads is that stuff will just work: not only on the machine itself, but also in your relationship with Apple.

Where is the CRM?

In my dreams of what CRM should mean, I imagine that there’s software running that catches problem cases like this. I’m willing to bet that the “event” of a customer bringing back a piece of defective equipment for the second time has a statistically high chance of signaling that he’ll be brining it back a 3rd, 4th, or even 5th time if they don’t decide to “Apple Sucks!” the whole transaction earlier. So if you tracked and then acted on transactions where service requests happened 2 or 3 times, it seems like you prevent crap-situations like Aaron’s problem.

I mean, if you’re going to be spending millions on CRM/ERP/etc. software, as I’m sure Apple has, isn’t the first use-case that you want preventing yourself from pissing off customers?

Telcos: Pissing off Customers as a Way of Life

Kim and I had a similar experience with Verizon this weekend. Her phone isn’t indicating that she has voicemail. So, she just checks it every few days to see if she has any. The person we talked to said that he couldn’t fix it and that she needed to take it to another location where a “tech” would figure out if it could be fixed or if she needed a new phone. The other location, of course, is only open 9-6 and located in another part of town.

Kim was so pissed she passed up on doing more shopping at the mall.

As Kim very logically put it:

1. It could just be a setting that needs to be changed, and then the phone will work.
2. The phone could be broken, in which case I’ll need a new phone.
3. Why wouldn’t they just give me a new phone, and then send the possibly broken one off to the “tech?”
4. If it turns out the phone is OK, just give it to another new customer.
5. If it turns out the phone was broken, they’d have to give me a new phone anyhow.
6. If they just swapped out phones right then, the customer would be happy, and Verizon would have just lost the time it took a tech to diagnose the phone (probably not too long).

As it stands, both Kim and I now detest Verizon. So, instead of losing the tech’s time, they’ll loose us as a customer as soon as we can figure out how to get out of their contract-claws.

Part of the above thinking is keeping your customer’s lives as lean as possible in addition to your own. Having to travel to another Verizon store and then wait for a tech to trouble-shoot the phone is way fat, and it’ll feel great to cut that Verizon fat off.

Technorati Tags: apple, crm, customers, customerservice, verizon