Mobile Me Customer Service...

[HD303]

Sucks!

I somehow lost all my contact information via mobile me. Iphone, macbook pro, iMac - it's all gone. Go to the my .me account, its gone as well.

SO I call Apple support. They tell me since this is an issue with Mobile Me, you need to open up a chat with the support. They do not have phone service support.

So I contact an agent via chat, he tells me he has escalated my problem and that I will be receiving an email about the situation WITHIN 24 HOURS. But a bunch of ********.

Sorry Mobile Me, it's a great concept, and when it works, it's great, but once you have an issue, and need urgent attention, you give the finger to your loyal customer base.

I'm done, carry on.

The dialog:
Hi, my name is Elvis R.. Welcome to Apple!
Elvis R.: I understand you are missing your data
Scott: All my address book contacts were somehow wiped clean - it's empty. Same with address books on my iphone, my macbook pro, and my imac. How do I restore this?
Elvis R.: I am sorry to hear this , is this the first time you have contacted apple about this
Scott: No, I called apple support, and they said I had to speak with you via this chat since it involved mobile me.
Elvis R.: Okay, and they came up missing today correct
Scott: Yes, I did nothing between last night and this morning with any app. The info is just gone.
Elvis R.: Okay
Elvis R.: Let me see what I can do
Elvis R.: this is contacts and calenders, correct?
Scott: Just contacts. Calender is still intact.
Elvis R.: Thank you
Elvis R.: Okay can I have you turn off your syncing until further notice.
Elvis R.: Because this issue requires investigation beyond what is available here in chat, I'm going to go ahead and escalate the issue to a MobileMe support Specialist. The specialist will look into the issue further, and follow up with you via email. You can generally expect the mail to arrive anywhere between 24 hours
Elvis R.: Can I have you go to your iphone and click on your settings tab
Scott: ok
Scott: got it. are you and I finished?
Elvis R.: We will be contacting you by email
Elvis R.: We are searching the servers for your information
Scott: ok, should I hold?
Elvis R.: No you will get an email when you do please respond if further information is needed
Elvis R.: I apologize for the inconvenience.
Scott: Not that I'm complaining, but it seems that phone contact would be a better choice than waiting for a response. Just my $0.02
Elvis R.: I understand and I will note that in my feedback on my side
Elvis R.: Would you like a feedback link so you can to
Scott: Yes, please.
Elvis R.: http://www.apple.com/feedback/mobileme.html
Elvis R.: Again I am very sorry
Scott: Thanks. Bye.
Elvis R.: Thank you for chatting with us. We value your feedback. Please click the blue "Close" button at top left to answer a few questions about your experience with us today.

 

[Bryan Bowler]

I totally agree! I'm absolutely livid right now.

Earlier tonight, I set-up syncing with my Safari bookmarks and it wiped out 70% of the bookmarks in my bookmark bar. We're talking over 100 and it will take me forever to retype everything in. Worse yet, there will be things that I will probably never recover.

So I get on the mobil me chat line since that is the only way Apple will support us. I waited 26 minutes for an agent that knew very little, and then my chat session was lost in mid-stride. I couldn't believe it. Now I'm back in the waiting cue again and it's a freakin 45 minute wait! I'm so pissed I can hardly stand it. $99 a year and this s the type of service we receive? Ridiculous!

 

[marbles]

ouch.

This rough experience aside why do you use Mobileme , what are it's benefits that made you want to pay $99

 

[HD303]

Mobile Me is a great concept. You put something into your iPhone, say a contact, or an event into the calender. It immediately syncs with your desktop computer, Laptop or both. I guess you could argue that if you place your phone in the cradle, then it will sync as well. And that is where I'm at now.

It's nice to have this info passed on without having to synch the iPhone, but after going through this experience and loosing ever thing in my address book, I'm reconsidering the value.

 

[Bryan Bowler]

ouch.

This rough experience aside why do you use Mobileme , what are it's benefits that made you want to pay $99

It's very convenient for keeping things in sync. For example, I have an iMac, a MacBook, and an iPhone. No matter where I'm at, all 3 stay in sync, all the time. It's incredibly handy.

As for the bookmark issue, I had never enabled that before, and that is where things went south. More on that in a minute...

Bryan

 

[Bryan Bowler]

I am incredibly disappointed with Mobile Me's customer service. Here's some quick facts:

- You can only contact them through the Chat Client. This is good for some situations, but not for others.

- I had to wait 22 minutes for an agent, and was the session was mysteriously dropped 15 minutes into trying to resolve my problem.

- I went to reconnect, and was faced with a 45 minute wait. I sat there with steam coming out of my ears.

- By shear chance, I got the same agent again. This guy did not know what he was doing -- as is usually the case with Tier 1 support.

- Although I had lost hundreds of important bookmarks on my iMac, they were still on my iPhone. He told me that all I had to do was connect my iPhone to my iMac and I would be given the opportunity to sync them back.

- I was certain that iTunes would automatically sync what was on my iMac TO my iPhone and not the other way around, but the tech assured me over and over that I would have the option to do send was on my iPhone to the iMac.

- Sure enough, this didn't happen. I lost everything on the iPhone too. I came unglued.

- The mobile me tech literally said, "Uh, I'm sorry. Let me get my supervisor."

- Level 2 tech gets on the phone and is much more knowledgeable, but tap dances around the fact that nothing could probably be done. He did elevate it to the a Mobile Me Special Support Team that would contact me by email within 24 hours to see if they could recover my data. I'm not very optimistic about this.

- Total time spent on their "chat help line": 3 hours and 20 minutes of my life that I will never get back. And I'm still without hundreds of bookmarks that I will to recreate and rediscover over time.

It's time to call it a day.
Bryan

 

[aristobrat]

I somehow lost all my contact information via mobile me. Iphone, macbook pro, iMac - it's all gone. Go to the my .me account, its gone as well.

So restore your contacts/bookmarks/whatever from a Time Machine backup of your iMac or MacBook Pro and you're back in business? Or restore your iPhone from a prior backup? That also might bring the data back?

I've never run into a "cloud" provider that could restore user data. Google, Apple, whoever, ... it's up to the user to backup their data. I think some folks are reassured that since their data is on multiple different devices, that it's somehow safe ... when all it takes is one bad sync, and the data is gone from the cloud, and then gone from the devices.

I'm sorry about your MobileMe customer service experience, but I don't think there's anything they can do to bring the data back. And unless you can recreate the incident, I'd be surprised if they can find a root cause.

 

[HD303]

So restore your contacts/bookmarks/whatever from a Time Machine backup of your iMac or MacBook Pro and you're back in business? Or restore your iPhone from a prior backup? That also might bring the data back?

Great idea, and I thought about that, only to find that my time machine was switched off. I gotta find that gremlin who sneeks into my room at night and does this ****. But anyway, TM was not an option - it is from this date forward and it seems to be working. Time Machine still remains a mystery to me.

never run into a "cloud" provider that could restore user data. Google, Apple, whoever, ... it's up to the user to backup their data. I think some folks are reassured that since their data is on multiple different devices, that it's somehow safe ... when all it takes is one bad sync, and the data is gone from the cloud, and then gone from the devices.

Apple actually did restore my data. I mean why not, they have it backed up somewhere. In the latest email I recieved, they specificaly say:
Dear Scott,

Thank you for your patience. I have successfully restored your contacts back to your MobileMe account. Please login at http://www.me.com and verify the restored information.

Please note that MobileMe Sync is not designed to back up data, such as Address Book contacts or Safari Bookmarks. I recommend backing up your MobileMe data, which is outlined in the following article:

How to back up MobileMe data
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1813

sorry about your MobileMe customer service experience, but I don't think there's anything they can do to bring the data back. And unless you can recreate the incident, I'd be surprised if they can find a root cause.

I was able to sync everything again and was 100% successful. I asked what could have gone wrong or was it something I did (I'm 99.9% sure I did nothing. But the bottom line is, I have my addres book back, and it only took six hours and numerous emails and chat sessions with MM customer support.

I really think they should reconsider have telephone support in the future. Nothing like wanting to fix the problem only to be told you have to wait up to 24 hours.

 

[marbles]

Bit rubbish I know, at least you got sorted in the end eh

Maybe they will offer you next year free for the waste of your time ?

 

[IgnatiusTheKing]

Sounds like MobileMe customer support was actually pretty good in the end. Really nice that they were able to restore your data.

Might be time to learn how to operate Time Machine though, so as to avoid this in the future, eh?

 

[synagence]

Seems like everyone here is basically complaining about tier 1 support ... to be honest, i've never come across a company yet that had anything other than moronic level 1 support...

Try companies like NTL in the uk (they got bought out in the end), i routinely had to sit on hold for 2 hours on the phone to get through their queue and then you talk to an idiot that barely understands what they're supporting let alone try to help.

 

[d21mike]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

Some tier 1 is great. I have used GoDsddy for years and get a different rep each time and they are all great. Also, just signed up for Netflix and had a question and call and he stay on phone with me until I understood every aspect of there service.