Slashdot Mirror
Steve Jobs Personally Resolves Customer Complaint
An anonymous reader writes "The Consumerist recently published a story about an Apple customer who went through support hell with a broken Macbook. After escalating the issue up the support chain, and a month wait for his Macbook, the guy gave up and simply wrote Steve Jobs a blistering flame-mail. So, was he surprised when Jobs' executive assistant responded back the next day! He got both a brand new Macbook, as well as his old one to copy the hard drive. The guy also responded in a comment, and he turns out to be a slashdotter! He even wrote a journal entry here about the story."
Sounds more like Job's admin staff dealt with it than Jobs himself.
How cool would it have been if Steve came to that guys house and rang the doorbell and said "I didn't appreciate the tone of your letter, it was very hurtful." and then just left.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
I don't believe what he sent would qualify as a flame-mail. It seems to be a well-reasoned and cool-headed response to a support nightmare. Kudos to Steve Jobs for fixing it for him.
...and now has an asshole that's about 3 bore sizes larger than it was last week. Yikes.
I'm sure he has a staff of secretaries that screen everything and is well versed by now how to take care of these relatively unimportant problems (unimportant to Jobs - I imagine that guy is busy with other, more pressing matters). Though it might be a good idea to have the CEO of any corporation see the failures of his organization every so often.
I've looked up the details of whoever's in charge and contacted them directly before. Or, more accurately, got the name of the managing director, called head office, asked to be put through to "their office" and spoken to their PA.
On the plus side, it's fantastically effective. A call from anyone at that level - or even their PA - will often go to the head of customer services very quickly, and get the issue resolved in far less time than trying to work your way up through a call centre staffed with people who quite frankly don't much care about any individual customer's complaint.
On the minus side, it's not something you'd want to do terribly often - particularly not with one company - as it would rapidly lose effectiveness. And if you find yourself in a position where you've got to do this more than once, even for separate incidents, maybe they don't need your business that badly anyway.
According to "Consumer Reports", Apple has the best customer service of ALL the PC and laptop makers and their quality also beats everyone. If you look at their charts, Apple takes the lead by a wide margin, none of this jazz of they're 8.2 while the closest competitor is 8.1. (Unfortunately, I don't have the issue in front of me to give you guys the real number numbers to show how well Apple rates.)
Now, here's the best, and they're pulling this horseshit!?
Stopping now because I need more coffee.
Steve Jobs is a deity, He came, he was killed (removed from the company) and returned again with salvation for Apple (iPod, iMac, generally making Apple cool)
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
One famous manager (I don't remember who exactly though) once said, that if the company's leader performs mere employee's duties then either he does not understand his role or there is something terribly wrong with the way the company operates.
Look at this story: the guy waited for months for the support to handle the problem!
May Peace Prevail On Earth
"So, I installed the WGA update and it mistakenly identified my OS as pirated....after two months of trying to resolve the issue through technical support where I was repeatedly assured that, '...we understand problem...send you SUPER DELUXE answer....next day....you betcha!', I finally contacted Steve Ballmer himself. Amazingly, he showed up at my house the very next day!.....and threw a folding chair at me.....so I bought a MacBook"
[DISCLAIMER: every word of this is BS (duh)]
A goal is a dream with a deadline
You know, some of us have known for a while that Steve replies to his email, or at least a small subset of the torrents he probably receives every day (a couple of public examples). He's answered a few of the questions I've emailed him over the years, too, and I'm just a regular Slashdotter Joe.
But the more publicity he gets for doing it, and the more people actually try to email him, the less likely he'll be to read and respond, and the less personal it's actually going to get. It's obvious from the numbers. Part of me hates myself for saying this, and I acknowledge that it's elitist as all hell, but I sort of wish these guys (the ones "in the know" about Steve's responsiveness over email) would keep it to themselves. Because if Steve stops answering his email, that's another piece gone of the old Apple spirit.
Of course, I suppose we must all eventually succumb to inevitability—but there's no harm delaying that end, while possible. So please. Enough. Let me suggest we simply appreciate Steve for keeping it real, and not trumpet it all over the blog-o-spierre.
Well the author of the mail certainly has not sent a flame mail. On the contrary, it is very level headed and well reasoned. However, I do believe the fact that he has been an apple customer for over 30 years and that he's an IT Manager at MIT with the ability to sway the students' and staffs' buying preferences (which he makes sure gets conveyed in the mail) had an effect. I doubt if I had been in the same situation and written a similar mail, would get a similar response. Overall, I applaud the author for doing the right thing.
Thats Richard Branson. He does that kind of thing because it gets in the news and it is much cheaper than paying for advertising. He is a similar kind of charismatic leader, though.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You start using foreign phrases and shit like that and it just oozes class.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I really wish I hadn't BCC:d the Consumerist now. That was a mistake. I did it because I was angry and didn't expect any kind of resolution from Apple Corporate. I really didn't believe that even if Jobs read his email he would take action to resolve the issue. And now the whole shebang is posted to slashdot. Along with his email address. What a mess.
My situation was extreme. I do NOT recommend emailing Mr. Jobs until fully exhausting the Apple support chain. If you have a problem, ask for a supervisor. If the supervisor can't fix it, ask for "customer relations". Call your local Apple store before sending that email (I did). And finally, after a month of hell, if all else fails, well... do a google search and find his current email address.
But please don't waste the dude's time. I would have the same opinion regardless of the CEO or company.
Bill Gates did the same thing once. The guy was found dead, strangled with his own Ethernet cable. I TOLD Uncle Chuck to get wireless, but would he listen...? Now it's too late...
That can't be Steve Jobs! I heard Steve Jobs is 12 feet tall and shoots lightnings with his eyes, and if he were here, he would fix all your laptops with firebolts coming out of his arse!
The saddest poem
I personally think that makes a very strong statement about Mr. Jobs's commitment to superior customer service.
Hmmm...I can't seem to find the page on Apple's website that explains how to escalate your problem past the Customer Service monkeys when you can't get it resolved. How is that superior customer service? I think the problem is that we're so used to crappy service that when we get *any* service at all it's considered "superior". I, for one, am not about to applaud Apple for "going above and beyond" when the thing that necessitated it was a complete failure of the system in question.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Did I ever tell you about the time Jobs took me out to go get a drink with him? We go off looking for a bar and we can't find one. Finally Jobs takes me to a vacant lot and says, 'Here we are.' We sat there for a year and a half -- until sure enough, someone constructs a bar around us. Well, the day they opened we ordered a shot, drank it, and then burned the place to the ground. Jobs yelled over the roar of the flames, 'Always leave things the way you found 'em!'
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I've always been pretty pleased with my Apple purchases, until I ordered one of the early Macbook Pro notebooks. I had to wait about a month for its arrival, which wasn't any fun - but I went into it knowing that would probably happen. What REALLY sucked is, when it arrived, it was completely D.O.A.! I could plug the power adapter in and got the green light saying it was supplying power, but the computer wouldn't do a thing. I went through all the usual steps (reset PMU, etc.) and no luck.
... or that's what I was thinking.) I opened the box though, and saw paperwork on top. Woah! It said they DID work on it already! New bluetooth module installed along with a few other related parts, AND they even fixed the display hinges I commented felt "a little bit loose"!
Apple promptly shipped me a postage-paid return mailer to send it back in, but I had to wait several *more* weeks for a second unit!
Then, shortly after receiving the second (working, thankfully!) unit, Apple announced a voluntary battery recall. Knowing the problems people had with other batteries splitting open, etc. - I called in to get that taken care of. I had to send in my original battery, which I did, but the replacement they provided refused to charge at all! I tried to get it resolved at the local Apple store, but after getting the big runaround (make an appointment to talk to us at the genius bar, drive home, and come back hours later, etc. etc.), I was simply told they had no more batteries in stock so they couldn't help me! Ugh! Why wouldn't they simply tell me that when I first came in, instead of the bull-headed refusal to speak to me until I made that appointment and came back later!?!
Then I called in to Apple, only to wind up arguing with some guy who tried to tell me I wasn't allowed to get free phone support because I had my laptop longer than 90 days and didn't pay for AppleCare! WTF?! I was asking about the BATTERY they JUST sent me, not the laptop itself! He finally did swap the battery for me, but only after a condescending attitude and an insistence I understand this was only being done because he was "making a 1 time exception" to their policy.
By this time, I was really getting pissed off at the way Apple's support seemed to be rapidly going downhill! But at least I had a working notebook for a while. That is, until one day, my bluetooth suddenly quit working! It was still within warranty by a month or so, so I gritted my teeth and called Apple. They made me give them my CC number first, but did walk me through some steps (including making a new user account in OS X to see if bluetooth would come back that way, which it didn't). Then they agreed it was defective and had me ship it back to them again.
I sent it off the next morning after receipt of their mailer, bracing for weeks of waiting AGAIN. The next morning, I had a box sitting on my doorstep when I was heading off to work. Huh? My notebook! I was REALLY pissed this time. (Obviously someone screwed up and didn't get it delivered properly, or Apple messed up and sent it back without even looking at it!
Was this service so prompt this time because Apple realized I had so many issues, and/or because I posted about all of it to several well-read forums? I'll never know - but THAT was TOP-NOTCH service!
I've had a couple of instances. Back in 1999, I bought a new HP Pavilion desktop machine. I was on dialup at the time and it had a Rockwell chipset modem on the same card as the sound. My phone line was not the best, 28.8 was obtainable on a very dry day in August, usually 26.4 was the usual connect speed, but I had no affordable alternatives. The HP modem would connect, but the call would be dropped within a minute. The two other computers in the house with different modems could stay connected for hours. I went through HP phone support with the techs there were reading from a script blaming the phone line. One of the guys even whispered "Read between the lines." I posted to their forums for my model and had my posts deleted where I criticized the modem. Finally, I wrote a very polite letter to the, then CEO, the one before Carly, describing the problem and why it was the modem, not the phone line or my setup. I mailed it from the Midwest on a Thursday. Monday I got a call from a gentleman in the CEO's office who said that if I bought whatever modem I thought would work and sent them a copy of the receipt via fax, they would immediately cut me a check for that amount. I bought the newest USR USB modem which sold for $239.95, faxed the receipt and got a check within 4 days.
Much more recently, I had trouble with a web site hosting company that I've had a site with for several years. They changed management and I started having serious trouble with the mail server where we have about 70 email accounts. For several days I tried to work through their phone support (Philippines - Very nice, Polite, easy to understand), but couldn't get the problem fixed with the server in Atlanta. I finally got escalated to email exchanges with a sysadmin, who wasn't getting the problem resolved either. I took a shot at guessing the email address of the CEO given that I now knew the pattern of their email addresses and got a quick response directly from him stating that I would be getting a phone call ASAP from their director of customer service and the head sysadmin. The calls came as promised and the problem got fixed quickly.
So sometimes getting to the top guy works, but I use it sparingly as it can be overdone, too.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain