rare pattern thoughts in a blog

It doesn't take a "genius" to know that there is something seriously wrong with my MacBook Pro. When you can't hold a wi-fi connection and get the gray screen of death two or more times a day, you pretty much have a worthless piece of junk taking up space.

I took it into the Apple Store on Twenty-Ninth Street and was greeted by a guy dressed more for playing ultimate frisbee than for working pretty much any kind of retail. I told him about the problems I was having and he snorted -- this was a familiar problem, apparently.

He walks me up to a computer "to make an appointment." Apparently nowadays you cannot have a problem with your Mac unless you have an appointment. Those of us with unscheduled failures can just twist in the wind.

After having to type in my contact information, he navigates to a screen and says, "You can have an appointment tomorrow."

"I need an appointment to have a problem taken care of?" I asked.

"You have to wait just like everyone else you see here," he said with a sneer, waving his hand at some 10 or 15 people all having problems looked at by "geniuses."

"Why can't I just drop the thing off and the tech department can deal with it when they can?"

"You have to be here."

"Why?"

"So they can know what the problem is."

Whatever.

I have never had to have an appointment to drop something off to a repair shop. I may have had to wait to get it fixed, but I've never had anyone tell me, in effect, "Take your problem away from here! Begone!"

Some years ago, home insurance companies were found to be deliberately shuffling adjusters so that people making claims would have to see several adjusters -- starting over each time -- before even getting a settlement offer. Presumably this was done because the companies wanted to delay as long as possible having to pay out money they owed to their clients.

Is this Apple's approach? Spread out how many people can actually have computer problems addressed in a given day, so that they don't have to deal with the crappy hardware they're using in their devices?

We have three other MacBook Pros in the office, and two of them are experiencing the same gray screen of death and wi-fi connection problems. (The guy with the functional MacBook Pro had at his previous job another one with the same gray screen of death problem.) Obviously this is something of a pandemic that should require a recall, not sending people with problems out into the street with no acknowledgment of anything.

Do you need an appointment to buy a computer? Don't be silly!

Oh, and I was going to buy a screen while I was there. Funny how treating the customer with contempt has an effect on sales.

One of the challenges of launching a new community or social networking site — or introducing new users to an existing site of more-than-modest complexity — is turning people on to the various features and areas. Any community site owner can rattle off a dozen "How do I — ?" questions that came flooding in to them in the first days and weeks of a public launch. (Even worse are the expected questions nobody is asking, because nobody has discovered that cool new widget or feature that apprently is languishing in obscurity.)

Ideally, good design can avoid the more obvious questions like, "How do I sign up?" But even the best-designed social networking site or online community is going to need some sort of introduction to its (hopefully) rich features. After all, new tools, ideas, widgets and usage trends are emerging every day, to the point that new sites almost always reach into feature areas that, for many, if not most, users were until that point largely unknown.

The flip side is that these days even 1-year-old sites and software can seem almost stale. People have come to expect almost any new community or "social networking" (which itself is a relatively new buzz phrase that reflects features that largely did not exist not all that long ago) site is going to offer new frontiers to explore, be they the as-yet-unknown features mentioned above, more common features offered in new ways, or both offered to existing online communities that have been under-served. As someone who develops Drupal-powered sites, which almost always embody myriad powerful features, I can say that, from my experience, this is a challenge that arises with almost every website launch.

The catch-all solution for the challenge of introducing a new site and/or new features to new and prospective community members is the site tour.

Creating a good site tour is always an editorial challenge. The site administration team has to come up with a good, clear, instructive, and hopefully entertaining (or at least certainly not boring) introduction to the site. Usually that consists of your basic page of text with a few graphics. More ambitious or resource-flush groups might produce a video or flash animation that gives an animated presentation. (My own personal bias is to largely avoid these presentations, as they almost always are boring, they almost always take a lot of time to plow through, and they almost always instruct by emulating reality, without any chance for folks to actually do anything — and there's no topping learning by doing.)

Enter Amberjack, a new open source JavaScript library that makes it incredibly easy to create site tours that walk users through the actual site. Licensed LGPL, with a fabulous online wizard that even a Luddite could appreciate, Amberjack is a way to create annotated site tours on actual site pages.

But don't take my word for it. Check out this quick site tour.

I read with relief that Apple has bailed on plans to go with tech support based in India. As Jobs explains:

In late May, Apple dismissed most of the 30 new hires at its subsidiary in Bangalore. (A handful working in sales and marketing will stay on.) Spokesman Steve Dowling would say only that Apple had "reevaluated our plans" and decided to provide support from other countries. Another source familiar with the situation, though, says the decision was cost-driven. "India isn't as inexpensive as it used to be," the source says. "The turnover is high, and the competition for good people is strong." Apple feels it "can do [such work] more efficiently elsewhere."

Here is where I should confess that my relief, as a Mac owner and, since 2002, semi-evangelist, comes not from Jobs' business rationale but from my own rather underwhelming experiences with India-based support.

Whether it's been Travelocity or United or Linksys or Dell or a number of other conglomerates, I've been left feeling consistently dissatisfied, disrespected, dismissed, denigrated and generally unappreciated by their "foreign" liaisons. (Travelocity and United couldn't care less about my itinerary glitch, Dell gave me the runaround more times than I care to admit [and at the end I had to pay for the privilege] and a Linksys rep actually attempted to blame a failing Linksys router on the fact that I was using a Mac. [I ended up futzing through and finding my own solution: manually re-setting the router's IP range].

I know I'm treading on some liberal taboos here. A reactionary reading of this post might place me square in the realm of being racist -- which is anything but descriptive. Perhaps that's why nobody every says the emperor has no clothes when it comes to foreign-based customer service.

Despite what people might assume, I don't consider it a race issue -- I consider it a cultural issue -- a corporate culture issue.

Here's the question: Do Indian support firms have any actual authority to provide meaningful customer service? More significantly, do any customer service departments for major corporations have any meaningful capability to really take care of their customers?

Last year, when I had some fairly persistent problems with my old 17" iMac, which went through no fewer than six midplane assemblies in one year, an understanding US-based customer service rep actually gave me a free upgrade of my Final Cut Pro suite to the then-current FCP 4.5 HD version. That counted for a lot, because I was incredibly frustrated with the (let's face it) crappy hardware components Apple was using in some of its machines, and their little concession to me bought a lot of goodwill on my part. At least they cared about me as a customer. And what did it cost them, in the end, to give away this upgrade? (In fact, I just upgraded again to FCP Studio, so they kept me on the paying upgrade path.)

I have to wonder: Would a wage earner in Bangalore have any authority to do this?

Certainly other tech support challenges can arise over the phone, such as ability to speak clear English -- but that's something that can happen within the US, even with native speakers -- and, for the most part, I've not run into that particular problem all that often.

But I do feel like I am attempting to speak across the divide. When corporations outsource their customer service to foreign lands, there's an implicit statement there that they really just don't want to deal with you. "Talk to the hand," they are in effect saying by sending customers to sub-contracted companies that can only say "no," and never "yes."

In other words, the attitude ingrained in corporate culture that the customer is a problem to be contained and managed -- this is the real problem.

Is there more to it? Police departments learned that you can't ignore culture when it comes to community relations -- and thus effectiveness within communities -- and have, over the past decade or two, instituted more community-based patrols and recruited from the communities they "serve and protect." Could it be time that corporations all over the world realize that the best customer service comes from the customer's own culture?

I don't know. But first they have to realize that customers are not problems but resources -- for money, for product/service feedback, for insight into new opportunities. Does anyone really know of any Fortune 500 companies that do that? Lately it seems "they" are more interested in service of process rather than service of the customer.