Apple’s Frozen Heart
This is a customer service rant with a twist. You have to wait for the twist, though!
This is a customer service rant with a twist. You have to wait for the twist, though!
I went to town (actually the Apple Store online) last December and bought myself an Apple Mac Pro and a 4K monitor. Since Apple doesn’t make its own 4K monitor, they resell Sharp’s, model #PN-K321. I could have bought an Apple Thunderbolt display ($999) but that’s “only” 27 inches and “only” high definition. I was going to town, and Apple offers the 32-inch Sharp Ultra HD LED 4K monitor ($3,595) as the alternative in the purchase flow on the Apple Store online. So what the heck!?
This is the configuration of my new Mac Pro, which has nothing to do with this story but everything to do with showing off.
In the second week of March (almost exactly 90 days after I got the system!), the display showed a line of pixels vertically down the middle of the screen that didn’t match up with the other pixels. (In technical terms, this is a column of bad pixels!) This isn’t a functional problem since it’s only one column of pixels out of 3,840; it is annoying and obviously not intended. But I was scheduled to go off the grid for 10 days so I put up with it.
The “bad pixels” in my monitor.
After I got back from vacation, I decided to tackle the problem of getting service for the monitor. I know enough to know that this isn’t a problem that can be fixed in the field (which happens to be my home office). But I know enough about customer service to know that no company will ever start with the belief that the customer actually knows what the problem is. So I had to be prepared to spend the time the company to go through its validation process.
Apple Care Call #1: Monday morning at the office — call Apple Care. Start with Apple Support. You have to have the serial # for the product, which I look up at Apple Store in my account. I get the phone # and find out there is a wait time so I choose to get a call back. I get called less then 5 minutes later. This is better than what I was expecting.
It takes five minutes, after establishing that I am who I say I am and describing the issue, to determine that I have to physically be in front of the computer and monitor to do the diagnostics. We schedule a call at 6:30am Wednesday, enough time for me to be done before my first appt.
Apple Care Call #2: Wednesday morning, up at 6am to make sure I have coffee! Call comes in at 6:47am. Restart the computer. Restart it again and reset the parameter RAM. By 7:15am, we determine that this is purely an issue with the Sharp monitor. I don’t know if you know this, but Apple does not support products it does not make. So if you buy anything from Apple that isn’t made by Apple, you’re on your own. I did know that so I probably should have just started with Sharp, but Ifelt like even Best Buy or Radio Shack would have made some effort to help me if I had paid them $3,595 for this monitor. Hope springs eternal.
Hope is dashed. The Apple Care rep tells me that I must call Sharp. (He did call some other department at Apple to see if he could bend the rules, since he agreed that it sucked to spend that much money and get a product that doesn’t work. But that didn’t go anywhere.) The rep starts looking for the Sharp 800 number (I could hear him using the keyboard to search for Sharp!). I asked him why he couldn’t just transfer me to Sharp, since I can look up the support number on the web just as well as he can. He said that wasn’t something the company did. He commiserated. I hung up.
Rant #1: Bad news, Apple. I know you don’t support other companies products. At all. (I learned that when you wouldn’t bother with the Nike FuelBand I bought from you). But wouldn’t it be customer friendly for you to make sure you have special access to other companies’ support, particularly for products you integrate into your store’s purchase flow for your own products? I spent $3,595 on this monitor as part of $15,116.20 I paid for a system. The least you could do is be prepared to tell customers how to reach the other companies’ support line. It would be way better to have the ability to transfer a support call directly to a specially trained rep at the other company.
Sharp Customer Support Call #1: Find the phone number. Go ahead, see if you can do it. I’ll even give you the link to the Sharp USA web site. First, you have to decide whether you are business or consumer. Huh? I chose Consumer “Other Information”. Rewarded with the Phone Number (1–800–237–4277). To be fair, the phone number is actually on Sharp’s first page; because it appears as 1–800-BE-SHARP, I didn’t trust that to be a support number. It is.
I dialed the number. Unlike Apple (which uses voice recognition to route your call), Sharp has traditional IVR (Interactive Voice Response) without voice recognition. (It means that Sharp hasn’t updated its customer-facing support system for at least 8 years.) I choose #1 (English), #5 (Extended Warranty), spoke to a very nice lady from Service Electronics Inc., who says they only deal with extended warranties, not with the manufacturer’s original warranties. She told me to start over and press 1 twice! (I guess it’s happened before, enough that she knows what to tell the random caller and more than the Apple Care guy.)
Sharp Customer Support Call #2: Pressing 1 twice leads to “operations and other support”. Then I pressed 4 for “other computer products” (not a computer, but not appliances or the huge range of other stuff Sharp sells). Then I pressed #3 and ended up in the wrong place again, but a very nice lady named Camille transferred me to Diego, who was also very nice. Diego speculated that the right department might not be open (on a Wednesday?). But he successfully transferred me to a gentleman named Jason, who appeared to be working and agreed that he was the right person to talk to about my monitor, a Sharp PN-K321.
Within 15 minutes, Jason did the diagnostics to determine that it was not an issue with the source (what Sharp calls a computer) or with the firmware (he asked if I had a remote, kind of like a television, but I don’t remember getting one). He indicated that the company would exchange my monitor for a working one and gave me an email address and a case number to send photos of the problem along with my invoice to prove the purchase.
I got an almost instant response from Charles Cole (who apparently monitors that email) approving the exchange. A few minutes later, I got an email from Brittany Williams initiating the exchange. I talked to Brittany, had an excellent and effective call in which I gave her the shipping address, she determined that Sharp would provide a brand new monitor, and that they would email return labels so I can send the broken one back to them.
Total Props To Sharp USA!: Here’s the twist. Within 15 minutes, Jason figured out the rght path to take and in another 15 minutes Charles and Brittany worked to solve the problem, which involves replacing the product that didn’t work. This is excellent customer service from a company that appears to employ people (apparently in or near Memphis, TN) who like working for the company and doing right by its customers. I’m tempted to say, even though it is a Japanese corporation, but I can’t honestly say that isn’t why the company acts like that.
Bottom line: Apple is an incredibly efficient and well run company that has no heart; clearly designed to do what it needs to do without giving its employees any leeway to do the right thing. Sharp Electronics is a subsidiary for an old and traditional Japanese corporation whose employees are well managed and motivated and have figured out how to help customers once the customers find them. Apple could give up a few points of its very healthy margin to make customers feel better; Sharp could delegate authority more so that its ex-pat operations are more modern and effective. But is one better than the other from the customers’ point of view?