The customer should not need to understand the technology or read the manual to use the product.

The support should be expensive/slow enough to encourage the user to check the manual first if a problem occurs.

The management should be responsive enough to be aware of the problem and have it fixed in a future update.

Apple is 8 weeks into providing iPhones. It’s a product made by, supported by, and used by humans. The question is not “are there flaws?”, but rather “are we ready to respond when problems occur?”

I’m still conflicted here. Stuff I use everyday needs to work. My satellite wasn’t working recently, and that’s so annoying. Turned out to be minor, much to my relief.

Think about cars. My car is in the shop b/c some doodad stopped working. Parts = $46, labor = $250, time spent = 2 hours max. Um, what?

To Mark’s point, management needs to pony up to give people better service. As I mentioned in the post, support jobs are full of noobs b/c 1) SUPPORT R HARD and 2) Support doesn’t pay enough to make up for the crap factor.

Customer-facing, support people should get paid to maintain the relationship. That didn’t feel like a rant.

Jake

I’m the dumb blonde housewife (in reality, none of the above) who didn’t know there was a switch on my phone to silence it. My husband used to work for Oracle, so I’d heard all the stories. For the record, my husband’s comment was “For $600, you shouldn’t have to read the manual.” But you can take that up with him.

In retrospect, I wouldn’t have bothered the genius if I’d realized what a zoo the Genius Bar is these days. I had not given it a lot of thought (as we now know, that’s my speciality) and I had assumed the problem was that I’d switched something in the software and that it would only take the genius two seconds to tell me how to get to whatever setting I had changed.

None of it was a huge incident in my life (or the genius’ life) and my main purpose in blogging was that I wondered if anyone else thought the Genius Bar was an idea whose time to be re-thunk had come.

Anyway… I liked your post.

> SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0
> 0 rows returned

I don’t mean to sound bitter about my own user support experiences (both as a customer and a provider), but I am, so that’s the way it comes out. As you pointed out, this is hard stuff – most users don’t have a clue about the inner workings or the complexity of the technology they’re using. Until we change that, the frustration is likely to continue.