It struck me as amateur night at the Apollo, but it did get pretty amusing as the night wore on.
"The activation servers are busy right now with the new release. I know how bad it sucks that your phone doesn't work now. Believe me. I'm in the same boat. You can try again later." Click. 1 second in available... "The activation servers are busy right now with the new release. I know how bad it sucks that your phone doesn't work now. Believe me. I'm in the same boat. You can try again later." Click. Ad infinitum. (I don't actually have an iPhone, but the callers don't have to know that.)
I don't have nearly the lofty opinion of Apple that some of my colleagues have, but I don't think it's a terrible company either. I guess I expected a little more competence when it came to releasing a software update. If you don't have the capacity to handle demand, then you manage demand. That's first-year business school stuff. A phased rollout (5 this week, 4S next week, or highest bidding cellular provider this week, next highest next week, etc.) would have left us looking like we actually knew what we were doing.
If call center work is your thing, I'm sure it seems pretty standard. I turned down a call center job with another outfit recently, given that it seemed marginally more unappealing than the job that I already have, so I get what you're saying.
I was just curious to see how it looked if you hadn't already been here for a while. Once things get back to normal, you'll probably love it. Your callers will think you're a demigod when they forget their security questions and you get them back into the app store. And they'll think you're a dick when you run a diagnostic and see that they're wildly exaggerating their battery issues. But that stuff seems to balance out in the end.
Did somebody call for a newbie? I just finished training, so my last mentoring sessions took place throughout the week. I was just starting to get comfortable with the phones, and then wednesday happened. It was my first TERRIBLE group of customers with only a few seconds to spare between calls. My mentor thought it was great practice, but I feel that my opportunity to learn more about how to talk to customers, troubleshoot problems, and actually use iLog (the consult feature, in particular) was very limited.
Why? We were all just taking turns answering the same question, which was by procedure to offer disgruntled customers zero solutions ("if it doesn't work, keep trying"). Eventually my hopes of applying any knowledge from training or even tackling a tough case that would have totally stumped me without the assistance of my mentor were crushed.
To make matters worse, the tools (especially the KBase) I, the inexperienced AHA, need in order to stumble through a phone call have been totally unreliable at best when I need them more than ever! I waste more time refreshing articles that failed to load than I do helping customers. It has been a nightmare the past three days.
Long story short: you took the very words right out of my mouth. Amidst the chaos, I couldn't help but wonder how could Apple be so foolish about the iOS 7 launch and the capacity of its servers during a time where it's so vital for them to be up and running properly, not to mention more than capable of supporting a massively high volume of traffic.
It's one thing to inconvenience customers with wide-spread activation issues and update installation errors, but it's another to leave the staff ill-equipped to really help anyone. My apologies for the lengthy vent! It has been a fantastic experience up until this week, and reading your post reassured me that maybe my thoughts were not so crazy after all. I start nesting on monday, and I've never felt so unprepared. I'm very worried.
