Airpods and the cost of customer service.
Antti Niittyviita
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I just contacted Apple customer service to file a ticket on my Airpods.
It took the customer service 25 minutes to gather all the relevant information about the issue and couple of attempts to solve it right there on the spot as well. Finally, we concluded that I should take my device to the dealer for warranty.
Have you ever considered how the situation looks at the other side of the counter?
- Customer service listens to your complaint and tries to help: 25 minutes
- Technical customer service attempts to fix the error and finally takes the device in for a warranty: 15 minutes
- Finally, a technician gets the device and investigates. Investigation and writing an incident report: 20 minutes
- Support process transfers the ticket to the development team for further study. Research and the decision that this one goes to the same bucket as the 1500 other similar Airpod errors related to connectivity: 10 minutes
- Product development team investigates, fixes and tests: 70 hours
- Shipping the fix over the air to the existing customers: 0 min
- Move through the same chain of support to deliver a replacement device to everyone who already returned their Airpods to the dealer for warranty: 20 min.
When one customer complains, that is not when people get around to making repairs. When 1500 customers complain, the cause of the complaint must be quite apparent.
The entire cluster of similar complaints takes a total of 1,5 hours to handle each. When 1500 people with remotely similar issues call the service, it takes a total of 2250 hours.
That one bug would consume 300 working days in the organization. Just out of curiousity. How much does that many days cost for your organization?
The mission of testing is to help eliminate most of these expenses while we still are developing the product. It saves both time and money to find and fix these issues before the customer has to suffer them.
Case closed.
(Oh. And by the way. My problem is easy to solve. I have an Apple Watch, and while I try to use both the Watch and Airpods at the same time, I lose call audio in most of the calls. It’s a bug in audio routing. Though I don’t like it, an easy workaround is to leave the Watch home :D)