Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Retail, iPhone
iPhone service challenges show how Apple can go the extra mile
For years, my Apple stuff has been super reliable, more than any other brand I own. So it came as a bit of a surprise when my trusty iPhone reported 'call failed' as I tapped a number from my address book. I assumed it was an AT&T cell problem, so moved out of the area and tried again. Same result. I looked at the iPhone screen and saw I had a full signal and 3G, so I tried yet again. This time I noticed that the call started, the signal dropped to zero (even the AT&T logo vanished) and the call failed again.Assuming cell tower gremlins, I didn't think too much about it, but as a precaution returned home and restored and re-synced my phone.
Next day I made another call or two with no problems, then patted myself on the back for dealing with the problem on my own. Then the same symptoms returned. Not only were outgoing calls failing, but incoming calls failed in the same way.
A trip to the Apple Store was in order, so I made an appointment and sauntered on in. The tech was helpful. Tried the usual tricks like restarting the phone, resetting network settings etc, but nothing solved it. We switched SIMs with another phone, but no joy there. He suggested I call AT&T and have them 're-provision' the phone. Did that but no dice.
It looked like it was finally time to replace the phone, so he pulled my serial number and had a kind of funny look on his face. He asked for reinforcements, and soon a manager joined my tech as they looked increasingly bewildered while viewing my account details.
They asked me if I had had problems with the phone before? I said no, it has been great. They asked me if I ever had a new replacement shipped? No again. Had I ever failed to return a replaced phone? Nope.
I started to feel slightly guilty about all this. It was like something out of Kafka. Perhaps I had done these things and blotted them out of my mind, but the reality was it seemed like they were talking about someone else. They said their records showed I had many problems with the phone, and that Apple has dispatched a new one, but I never sent the old one back, and even worse, that would make replacing my phone problematic at best.
I was flabbergasted, but the manager guy said he was going to the secret Apple back room and would return soon. While waiting, my mind spun up a hundred scenarios, all ugly. Could I possible have forgotten all these problems? Was I a victim of identity theft? What would I do if they said they wouldn't replace the phone? Etc, etc.
After about 40 minutes he told me had made several calls and determined that someone else with my name in another state had created the long trail of problems that had somehow wound up under my name and iPhone serial number. One can only wonder how that could have happened.
The story ended happily, and the Apple store guys really went the extra mile to get to the bottom of this, rather than just dust me off and say 'tough luck'. I wonder how many retail chains would do the same?
Lessons? Computer systems and people aren't perfect. Somehow my name and iPhone were attached to someone else, and without a lot of determined effort I would have been sunk, probably forced to buy a new phone and left to try to repair my incorrect service record. I don't know if the help I received from my Apple store was typical, but a great effort was made to trust me and get to the bottom of the problem. If it is typical, it helps explain the high rankings Apple gets for customer service. My nightmare ended happily. May all your nightmares be little ones that are easy to fix.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Paul said 2:23PM on 1-07-2009
Sooooo.... what happened with the phone?? Did they give you a new one??
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drewgaren said 2:27PM on 1-07-2009
I have had similar problems, but nothing that bad and usually it has all come back to AT&T for me. My know does not seem to be the one to blame. However I have had many more issues with a jailbroken iPhone then factory. I would restore but there is just so many things I use with my jailbroken phone versus the factory settings.
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Jim said 2:37PM on 1-07-2009
Over the Christmas Holiday's my wife and I traveled to Hawaii for vacation. On our second morning when I awoke and turned on my iPhone it there wasn't a recognizable sim card installed. After checking to make sure the sim card gremlins didn't come in the middle of the night and steal my card we went to the AT&T card. They tried a new sim card with not luck and blew me off to the Apple Store. I walked into a very crowded store without and appointment at the genius bar, told the first consultant I was on vacation and what had happened. 30 minutes later I walked out with a new iphone, 5 minutes later with the use of mobile me I had all my contacts, email, trip calender with reservation numbers back in my phone. That night at hotel I reloaded my favorite everyday Apps and I was good to go. Best customer service I have ever experienced!
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DarkLord7854 said 2:45PM on 1-07-2009
It's kind of a given for a retail chain/company to get to the root of a problem with their product. Not doing so would make the customer angry and could potentially hurt their sales if word started spreading, especially if it went through the news locally and then gets picked up by bigger news sites/papers. That's also without counting the fact that the company/store could be sued by said angry customer.
Of course, it also depends on whomever you talk to, land on some grumpy employee who doesn't care about his job and he'll probably make a significantly less efforts to resolve your problem.
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LuminousNerd said 2:51PM on 1-07-2009
It's not a given at all. I have had a lot of broken electronics in my time. I have called a lot of support companies and the only one that does a good job is Apple. You would think it should be a given, but it's not. Apple deserves major, major kudos, because every single time I go there the experience is always the same: Helpful and reliable. I have literally never once experienced the level of support anywhere else that I get from Apple every single time (I've been in maybe 20 times now, for my menagerie of Apple products, and even though some of the time it was my fault, they were still very helpful)
James Donevan said 3:02PM on 1-07-2009
"It's kind of a given for a retail chain/company to get to the root of a problem with their product."
Not in this world. The usual reaction of most chains/companies is to shirk responsibility at every opportunity. If you read any consumer reports the vast majority of customers express dissatisfaction with most companies' after sale service. Apple is one of the few companies with consistently good after sale customer service. Invariably it rates among the best companies in this respect.
Red_iPhone said 7:41PM on 1-07-2009
You've obvioulsy not dealt with the likes of Best Buy etc. There are lot's of places that don't care two hoots about the consequesnces of thier bad service.
alf said 2:56PM on 1-07-2009
mel, the problem is/was not your phone, it's the crappy at&t service! my gf and i both have brand new iphones that we got together on the same day. often times, depending on location, we've tried up to 14....FOURTEEN!!!... times to call each other to no avail, and just gave up. at&t is the worst choice apple could've ever made. more bars in more places = infinite dropped calls, even with a 100% full 5 bar signal! this was the same thing that always happened with moto razors, samsung, et al. it's the network, not the hardware!
believe me, i was both a sprint dealer and user for 10 yrs and not only do they lease the most bandwidth nationwide, but they rule when it comes to clarity and the lowest dropped calls. leaving them for at&t was something i did reluctantly, and ONLY b/c of the iphone!
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THJ said 4:50PM on 1-07-2009
Keep in mind that not everyone lives/works/travels the same places you do.
Sprint service in the DC metro area is horrible (my wife is on Sprint, and half the time she calls me it's garbled), while I have almost no problems with ATT. I have friends in various places around the country where Verizon is best, places where Sprint is the best, places where even T-Mobile is the best.
It's all relative, so sweeping statements like 'Carrier X has terrible reception while Carrier Y works perfectly' don't really do much unless you are giving advice to someone that lives/works in your vicinity.
alf said 5:14PM on 1-07-2009
i agree with you in general, but at the same time, after using sprint in all the places i've lived in the US: nyc, l.a., new orleans, houston, DC [ironically], atlanta, and on a major city national US tour [band], w/o almost not a single problem with dropped calls in about a decade on sprint, now all of a sudden i can't complete a damn call on at&t half the time. in the past month i've been in new orleans, thru miss and alabama, atlanta, virginia, baltimore and DC, and have had misc. issues with at&t in almost all of these areas.
calls don't connect, the phone sits there like it's calling for 10 secs- then fails, a call starts then drops, dials then drops, et al. [oddly enough, it happens inside of my house and downtown atlanta most often] anyone else having the same issues in any of these same places?
Mike said 2:55PM on 1-07-2009
You lead up to finding the root cause, and then tell a story about a user's account complaints being switched......
I've had days with my 3G where I couldn't place calls for hours on end even with great cell coverage. Firmware upgrades never helped, things have just gradually gotten better.
The best thing to try was a reboot, which brought some life back into my phone. The only correlation I could find was using terminal on my jailbroken phone. When I had issues placing calls, outptu from ifconfig -a would show I had two IPs for the cell network on the pdp_ip0 and pdp_ip1 interfaces. Normally, only one interface has an IP.
At my work desk, I normally have 5 bars and 3G. I remember one week where I got 1 bar and EDGE. But as soon as I'd walk 10 feet away, I'd get 3G back.
So the 3G isn't perfect, but WTF caused your issues?
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Steveo said 2:56PM on 1-07-2009
Wish I could say the same. We had and issue with the mouse on a iMac that was less than a six months old. We did purchase the Apple Care, so the iMac was covered "bumper to bumper" for 3 years. Made the appointment, off to the Apple store. After 30 minutes in that "secret" back room, they came back and said the mouse needed a "part" and they would have to order it. When I asked why I could not just get a replacement...I was told they do not have any. The funny part was that she was standing in front of the wall display with about 4 dozen Mighty Mouses (or is it Mighty Mice) staring at me. After some 10 minutes of gentle persuasion I did leave with a new mouse.
Maybe it is just me.....let the bashing replies begin in 1....2....3
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alf said 3:00PM on 1-07-2009
steve, i asked the very same thing when my airport extreme decided to go kaput on me. i thought they'd just hand me a brand new one right off the shelf.
i asked, and they told me that they can't just pull them off of the retail shelves, and that i'd be getting a refurb. that's why they don't just hand you a brand new one and send you on your way.
Richard said 7:41AM on 1-09-2009
They have to do a service exchange, as they get paid by Apple for doing the swap. Apple Mice have no service-replaceable parts, so the part they were ordering was a whole new mouse. Some places do give you a new one with no packaging and pretend your faulty one was brand new dead on arrival in the box your new one came in, but that's a bit sneaky at best.
Gus said 3:12PM on 1-07-2009
Yeah, what happened with the phone, did they replace it or...
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Alex said 3:01PM on 1-07-2009
sounds to me like Apple is acting like Fry's: they get a product with problems returned, package it back up and sell it as new. How else could a bad phone happen to have all those issues tied to it?
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robogobo said 3:41PM on 1-07-2009
bingo
nick said 3:03PM on 1-07-2009
I had a somewhat similar situation with my Time Capsule.
It seemed to stem from having a 0 and O and maybe even D being too similar on the serial number.
It started with me scheduling a support call and hitting a wall when typing in the serial # I thought I read, then guessing another one. This was my first support call ever, but I had typed in a serial that was registered to someone else, so they thought I was that person, and they needed to clear it all up.
While it wasn't fun, my situation was eventually corrected and I got the support I needed. I still don't know if my TC is registered to me with the correct serial number or not...
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el_bob said 3:06PM on 1-07-2009
you have some white stuff on your chin.
i get that kind of service at a lot of places i shop. i call it "normal service". anyone who gives less doesn't get my business. that's not extra mile service.
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Michael said 5:23PM on 1-07-2009
If it was that way in reality, it would be awesome.
I spent an entire evening trying to get SOMEBODY to get my girlfriend and I the room we ordered in a resort in Hawaii, after we showed up to find a room with two single beds. The travel agent, the hotel clerk, and the hotel CHAIN all just told us to live with it, there's nothing they can do (hotel not full, just nothing they can do). Finally the next morning I found someone willing to take responsibility for customer service.
This is more and more common. When we have an issue, Apple customers are glad we decided not to pay $499 for a cheapie Dell and hope we never need to call India to get pre-written responses and our first name repeated 5000 times.