In a previous blog, I spoke about outsourcing, and the trade-offs for both companies and consumers, given the practise of many companies to outsource customer support globally. Here I shall speak about a related issue — the current tendency of most companies to skimp on or omit human customer support altogether. I shall illustrate this by describing three hours I spent yesterday and today trying to find a nearby store that had a USB-C to VGA converter for my Mac laptop.
Read More »
My cell phone is malfunctioning in many ways. Top four problems: it no longer recognizes my fingerprint; I seem to have misplaced my AppleID, which together with the fingerprint recognition problem, makes it impossible to do many things; it does not sync properly with my laptop; and I have to retype my password many more times a day then is sensible.
So today I tried calling the main downtown Apple store, in the Toronto Eaton Centre, to make an appointment with a “genius”. In the past, I have reached someone there, or perhaps in Toronto, or at least in Canada, who had some idea of the geography. Today I first had to fill out a form on my cell phone, which wanted me to choose one its options with a canned support answer on the site.
Read More »
Computers and Society 