Apple to Drop Customer Support via Social Media
Joe Rossignol (via Dave Mark, Jeff Johnson):
Apple is planning to eliminate social media support advisor roles across Twitter, YouTube, and the Apple Support Community website starting later this year, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. When this change takes effect, customers will no longer be able to receive support from an Apple employee on these platforms.
[…]
Apple is offering hundreds of affected employees the opportunity to transition to a phone-based support role in the company, but some advisors are unable to or unwilling to make the switch, the sources said. Apple is not allowing employees to switch to another chat-based support role in the company unless medically necessary, which has caused anger and frustration for some members of the social media team, one of the sources said.
On the one hand, I like the idea of meeting customers where they are and offering assistance proactively. Without this, many of them would probably not seek out direct help, and the issue would remain unresolved. On the other hand, my experience as an observer and occasional venter has been that the Apple representative would often chime in to a discussion without really reading the context of what was being discussed, which made them look out of touch. Or they would immediately suggest taking the discussion private, in which case there was no community benefit of seeing the troubleshooting steps and solution.
I don’t understand why these employees aren’t being transitioned to chat support roles.
Previously:
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TL;DR: Apple reps on the discussion forums are useless most of the time anyway.
I find that the majority of the time, the "solutions" put forth by official reps on the Apple Discussions board are misguided and involved suggestions that have nothing to do with the actual problem. They apparently don't take time to read the initial question nor to understand the actual issue, even when it's very clear to everyone else in the thread. All we get are cut and paste answers that are total BS and often require taking the most drastic steps possible (such as resetting everything on an iPhone) even if there is a way to solve it non-destructively.
Agree with Ben. If I even click on a link to an Apple discussion forum post anymore, which is usually accidental or a last resort, I still automatically scroll past any answer written by a representative. Always useless, always missing the specificity of the problem.
