After Apple

Several years ago I heard the announcement that Apple would work with a contractor group in Bangladore and open up an Indian call center for AppleCare. The first words uttered in the room are, for the most part, not repeatable, but the groans and wails made one think someone had died. Thus began the great experiment.

For years, other companies had been outsourcing their labor to India for a dime on the dollar, at worst. Many companies had succeeded in doing this with minimal backlash from their customers, so it would appear that Apple felt it was time to try it, seeing as everyone was used to the idea from other companies. So they hired a firm, sent some folks out to train them, and then brought them online some time later. Shortly after that, every last human in AppleCare knew it was a mistake.

No one could understand them. Not the phone agents here, or the customers calling. I know I couldn’t get a word out of them that was remotely understandable. People who talk to these folks face-to-face forget that the telephone has the quality of an AM radio station — much is lost. It was not uncommon (and in my dealings with AppleCare post-departure, still isn’t) for the American agent to ignore everything the Indian agent did and just start over because he just couldn’t understand what had already been done. There are case notes, sure, but their written English wasn’t much better.

The times I, personally, called in, I was asked to shotgun troubleshoot right there on the phone. One time several years ago, for instance, I had a problem with my AirPort Extreme base station where it would refuse to dial out after a certain period of time. I’d have to go to it and power cycle it before it’d come back and be usable. So I called in about this and the Indian agent asked me to go to my computer’s network settings and make sure the PPP settings on my AirPort in System Preferences were setup properly.

blink

After some argument over the existence of a PPP tab in AirPort I gave up, “Yes, it has the right information.” In fact, after that moment where I realized I not only knew far, far more than the phone monkey than I expected, but that he hadn’t the slightest clue what he was talking about, I just arranged all of my answers such that I’d trigger a transfer to tier two support. Once I got one of the American fellows (for whom I had to relay the entire problem again, surely because of a lack of proper communication about the case) he directed me to do a couple of things, including running AppleCare’s rather convoluted Capture Data script (which looks like monkeys on crack wrote it) and returning that to him … when the issue was with the base station’s firmware, and I told him as much. They replaced the base station, and it still failed, and then he decided it might be what I’d said it was and got me in touch with someone higher. Some time later an update came out that resolved it — right as I went to broadband. Love the timing.

Never the less, that fellow actually had a remote chance of helping me. He was a native English speaker, was trained rather well (well enough), and had the resources at hand to help. I don’t believe any of these things are present in the Indian centers. I’ve called to setup repairs for my iBooks as well, and had to push through those monkeys several times by starting off the call saying I’d done everything I possibly could and just answering “yes” to every question except: “does it work?”

I don’t think anyone in America was in fear for their jobs, except initially. After a while it was obvious that it was just another call center and life would move on, but we still had to pick up all the broken pieces from those agents, and it really left a sour taste in our mouths when we had to blindly defend them as … “co-workers.” It’s kind of like when parents re-marry and the kids never get around to calling each other brother or sister. “My mom’s husband’s kid” or the like. They were “AppleCare’s Indian experiment.”

I’m sure it’ll go on a lot longer because it’s just plain cheaper, but I can tell you that it really doesn’t help anyone on either side of the phone. The customers are upset and the employees are upset (just too scared of Apple to really say it).

It’s a waste of everyone’s time, but it gets the calls answered and the queue times down which is the end goal of any call center management. They pay lip service to the customers and good support, but they care about numbers that they can show off to their bosses, who can show off to their bosses. Good experiences seldom come across in numbers, so no one really cares because it furthers no one’s career.

Before my time at Apple, I’d never seen a person that could appear so civil and human but honestly not care a lick about their current job or yours. In Apple, it was the exception for someone to not be that way. Enterprise was blessed with some human managers, but in many other places I’d worked and with people I interacted with it simply wasn’t the case. Numbers, not good interactions, drove decisions. It was a daily struggle of the good managers and good agents to fight against the rampant idiocy raining down from above, and India is no exception.

The decision happened so far above that no one had the influence to change it. We had to just live with it, and the current folks there still do, as do we who have to call in for service now and again. I’m blessed to live in a city with an Apple Retail Store because I can get a face-to-face appointment for service rather than have to endure Ranjeet, er, “Steve” and his attempts to pull knowledge out of his rectum mid-flight.

I wish there were a way to effect change to this decision outside of Apple myself, but there’s not. But there is a way that everyone can. Complain. Complain to the next English-speaking agent you get a little, make sure you complain to his manager (be nice and reassure that agent that it’s not about him), and send in letters to Apple detailing bad experiences with such agents. You don’t have to do it every time, but at least do it once. Right now, they’re sitting there with their fingers in their ears about the issue because it’s saving them money. Don’t let it fester long enough as to become a staple.

It’s a bit of a common mistake to think Apple’s abandoned India due to recent news. This is incorrect. Apple was setting up an additional call center, to be staffed by Apple employees. That was cancelled right as it started, but the original Bangladore center is still there, unless things have changed in the week since I’ve called in and talked to Sanjeet, er, “Steve”.

Inside Apple’s India Call Center