Apple gets up early and blogs to dig itself out of iPhone customer service hole

Davey Winder
Sunday, 27 July 2008 18:40

Your IT - Mobility

So it seems that Apple is finally starting to listen to the numerous complaints which, to be brutally frank, have turned into something of a media feeding frenzy over the last couple of weeks. But can blogging every other day and opening stores a couple of hours early really dig Apple out of this nightmare customer service hole?

And what is Apple doing to address the balance in the customers are a pain in the ass perception argument? Well for a start it is providing some meaningful information, such as that posted to the MobileMe status pages.

With Steve Jobs apparently ordering what for all intents and purposes could well be the first ever official Apple blog posting to update customers about MobileMe problems "every other day or so" the company is at least admitting it has got things badly wrong and telling impatient consumers what is being done to put them right.

"In the 14 days since we launched, it’s been a rocky road and we know the pain some people have been suffering" writes the unfortunately anonymous Apple bearer of good news.

Or should that be bad news? "We particularly regret to report the loss in the affected accounts of approximately 10% of the messages received between July 16 and July 18" the masked blogger continues, referring to the 1 percent of MobileMe users who found their mail accounts blocked.

And the reason for the service outages? A really rather weasel-worded admission that "we had a lot more traffic to our servers than we anticipated." Really? Apple did not expect the iPhone 3G to be a huge seller? Apple did not expect that everyone and their Aunt would want to upgrade to the new Version 2.0 software?

Apple did not expect that lots of these people would want to try out the hugely hyped 'Exchange for the rest of us' that is MobileMe?

I find that hard to believe, I am afraid. Either Apple has suffered an uncharacteristic failure of its own self-belief when it comes to products and services, or Apple has suffered an uncharacteristic failure in business common sense.

Is Bill Gates now working for Apple customer service? Will opening Apple Stores a couple of hours earlier reduce the queues in America? Read on to find out...

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