261–270 of 566 posts
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Wow, I'm all for not wasting food, but that's really tacky.
What's tacky about offering free food that no one is obligated to eat? GP might have written one of the most entitled things I've seen!
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But... customer support isn't a cost center at Apple. They sell the AppleCare extended warranty, and if you don't purchase that when you buy the product, you have to pay them by the minute for customer support via telephone.
And most customers just go into an Apple Store if they have a problem, which is a profit center.
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An adept representation of a limited sample of the issues surrounding customer support and similar departments. The problem is that it doesn't have to be like this. There are exceptional cases where customer support is not like this. Many of them have gained considerable benefit from investing in their customer support. One source of difficulty is that evaluation of those benefits requires very complicated (for an av…
Do you, by chance, have a list of those exceptional cases? I'd love to learn more! edit: thanks everyone for these replies they're great, keep them coming!
My experience with them was the best customer support experience I have ever had. They were great. They were prompt, knowledgeable, and compassionate.
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Apple is actually probably the best example of a company taking a cost center (in this case, manufacturing and logistics) and turning it into a strategic advantage. Apple wields its supply chain like a weapon. It's very difficult to compete with Apple because the world has a limited supply of high-quality parts (flash memory, LCD screens, etc.), and Apple can just outbid everyone else for the entire market supply for…
"nobody could build a phone at the same level as Apple." People have to put their iphones in bulky cases because the screens break so easily. I have dropped my Samsung Note4 so many times, and it is fine (also, the charge lasts three days. Did I mention it is really fast too?).
[1]: https://medium.com/@BoltVC/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like...
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Is this supposed to be ironic?? Given, you know, the original poster's grievances.... Support Heroes?.. No?
Not at all ironic. OP was posting about how customer support is a cost center, amongst other claims. He stated that it is like this in any company. I completely disagree and have experienced the proof of that first hand. I'm a little unclear from how you worded things--was the question around the notion of firing people as heroic juxtaposed against what we call our support team (ie. Heroes)?
Other orgs. in the company are generally a lot nicer to work in, though it varies where you wind up.
One of my friends used to work at Apple. After one particular grueling stint of 14+ hour days, management decided to give them a thank-you. In the form of vouchers. For frozen dinners. Meanwhile, all of his friends worked for Google, we got gourmet food every meal of the week as a standard perk, and we were usually home by 8 or 9 PM rather than midnight. It's sorta like "Your 'thank you' is really more like a giant '…
With this negative image among developers in the Valley, how is Apple able to attract top quality engineers? They probably are not. Anecdotally, I still haven't met one single engineer who would love to work for Apple though they love using Apple products. Apple is not even on the list of all top graduating kids who wants a job in top valley firms (Google, FB, Dropbox, Twitter, AirBnB, Uber, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Quor…
I know Apple recently poached a bunch of people from one of the above-named companies.
But... the author worked in customer support, managing agents. Customer support in any company is like this: it's full of bobblehead managers who make work to justify their own jobs. It's a cost center, and cost centers are where you put executives who are capable, but not exceptional. This is why OP has stories about how firing people was considered heroic -- when you work in a cost center, the only thing the busine…
You are painting with an overly broad brush. Where I work, our Support Heroes (yes, we call them Heroes because the lengths they go to for our customers are heroic) are one of the main reasons so many of our customers love us and stick with us so long. You've probably heard that it can cost ~5x more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. An exceptional Customer Support team is your front line in fight…
Not only that, but support tickets are also an excellent opportunity to turn unhappy customers into evangelists.
But... the author worked in customer support, managing agents. Customer support in any company is like this: it's full of bobblehead managers who make work to justify their own jobs. It's a cost center, and cost centers are where you put executives who are capable, but not exceptional. This is why OP has stories about how firing people was considered heroic -- when you work in a cost center, the only thing the busine…
You are painting with an overly broad brush. Where I work, our Support Heroes (yes, we call them Heroes because the lengths they go to for our customers are heroic) are one of the main reasons so many of our customers love us and stick with us so long. You've probably heard that it can cost ~5x more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. An exceptional Customer Support team is your front line in fight…
In "Becoming Steve Jobs", Tim Cook says the following in regards to Apple's collusion scandal: "I know where Steve's head was. He wasn't doing anything to hold down salaries; it never came up. He had a simple objective: if we were working together on something, like with Intel, where we threw everything in the middle of the table and said, 'let's convert the Mac to the Intel processor', well, when we did that, we did…