Can Apple Provide Customer Care to the Professional Market

I don’t know if any of you followed this story, but here’s gist. A man in Dublin, Karl Hayden, bought an iMac with Apple care. It broke. Apple sent bits to fix it. It didn’t work. They agreed to replace it, but a week later, hadn’t arranged to collect the broken one. He got fed up and decided he could deliver it to them on foot faster then they could arrange to collect it.  In the end, the head of Apple Corporate Affairs in Ireland called him, said sorry and got him a new mac in 90 min.

Ok, apple got them selves out of a bit of bad PR with a handshake and phone call. But this leads to I wider issue which plagued us at Pogo Films. There is no justifiable use for Apple Care in the professional market. Apple are servicing businesses with loads of machines but is unable to fix the problems fast and in the Post Production world is unable to help because the systems are built as much around third party hardware as anything apple. Take for instance an HD editing suite with a G5 (Even a top notch £6K dual core job). Well, that box is surrounded by some £20-30K + of hardware and is potentially generating upwards of £1000 per day in revenue for the facility. If that Mac goes down and it takes Apple a week to fix it, not only are the clients pissed and have long since gone elsewhere, but the loss to business exceeds the cost of the machine outright. The only solution is a same day replacement contract through your supplier, or as we did. Buy 2.

How well then, can Apple compete with its DIY post solution against the likes of Avid Quantel and Discreet. Pretty well it would seem, but even with large scale adoption, I don’t see it taking over the BCC. I think as much as engineers and assistants can stem the problems, every facilities or Ops Manager wants the corporate company they can trust.

This description of Apple’s customer care services as nonexistent, seems to rise from there view of themselves as a personal computer company. Massive enterprise solutions excluded (They pay attention to those clients), more and more businesses are relying on Apple servers, towers and SAN solutions as part of wider infrastructures, yet Apple focuses its attention on personal customer service as personal computers remain its core business. They are selling boxes, not services or editing systems. Their focus is ipods, not capture cards.  I have seen a number of praises for Apple’s Customer Service. Recently, Ramit over at iwillteachyouoberich.com wrote about how Apple gladly replaced his ipod headphones and in turn generated a positive review of Apple. I too have faulty ipod headphones, but have not bothered calling because of my painful experiences dealing with them when working with a top end editing suite. The issues are just beyond their support. Ultimately, Ramit’s livelihood did not depend on his ipod headphones being replaced that day. In this case Apple shines. Your success on a project or with a client may depend on how fast you can get another G5. So have a backup plan! Ultimately Apple is huge and the cost of implementing an effective worldwide support service for its professional clients is unrealistic. And yes, I do know of Apple Care Pro. It just sucks.