After Apple

One of the things that really annoyed me when I worked in AppleCare was the Knowledge Base. We were told when we started working there that it was the end-all and be-all of troubleshooting knowledge, but most of the time it came up with printer cleaning articles for an LW 16/600 rather than the answer to your question. In addition, the beast was slow. Very slow. Slow enough that if you used it on a call the other person would think you were “slow” for having to think that long. A lot of times, you felt like it.

The folks that had been working there for any amount of time before my class came in showed us that the Tech Info Library (TIL) was still online, internally. It was the precursor to the Knowledge Base and, yet, was more advanced, supporting boolean searches, and was both fast and accurate. So, the KB simply fell into disuse among internal users. Time and time again we were told not to use the older server and that it would go away someday, but, honestly, when something works you use it.

Then, one day, they stopped updating the TIL servers with new documents. While this was annoying, we wound up searching one and then the other instead of relying on the KB for everything. It really didn’t phase us. It was still only marginally slower to search the TIL and then the KB because the TIL was more accurate and faster, and it usually had the answer.

Seeing that that plan didn’t kill the practice, there were then the meetings. Some of the KB people came to our team meetings, then some of us went to theirs. Sometimes there’d be a survey or two, or some very unlucky soul would go around asking how it could be better, only to be greeted with the obvious, “Well, the article search could actually find articles, maybe?” We thought this was just general harassment and an attempt at understanding the social reasons for using old technology rather than that new-fangled piece of crap they were forcing on us. We thought wrong.

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.