Comment by flir
3 hours ago
Apple does positive scripting ("I understand that must feel frustrating, I had a similar issue once, I'm going to solve your problem"), but at least I can reach a human, even if that human talks like they've been brainwashed by a cult.
My ISP has actual techies answering the phone, and their approach is more "well that's a bit crap, I can have an engineer there by Thursday". I've only needed them a couple of times in a decade, but I've been left with a mile-wide grin both times. As long as that's true, I'm a customer for life.
The last time I called Apple the phone service employee hit me with “I understand your issue as I am also a student” when I replied that I wasn’t a student he then followed it up with “Oh, neither am I”
My phone slipped out of my pocket as I was getting into my car, and I unknowingly ran over it.
When I submitted an AppleCare replacement request for it, the employee said “Oh man, I hate it when that happens!” and approved it.
I figure that’s the script, or maybe he had a chronic issue of running over his own phone.
Yeah the support is scripted and annoying a lot of the time. There's always a song and dance like having you remove your VPN (mine is split tunnel but they don't care) to verify some failure case, loading profiles, etc. - but at some point when all avenues are exhausted they will escalate to an engineer and make detailed notes, and usually follow ups which might be with another engineer usually has a full understanding of your situation. A few times they've managed to fix these issues but it can take months.
For hardware issues too it's pretty good, though I've only ever dealt with the Genius bar, and never done a mail in of the product in question.
For software I've never really seen this kind of service at scale, e.g. with Microsoft. And for hardware, it's essentially chatbots in a loop these days which I experienced with Lenovo trying to get support for a laptop that wouldn't power on (never managed to get a human to support me and gave up).