I am on my 3rd iPhone, entered refurbished replacement-ville in early Jan 2008. The reason for the latest replacement is the same from the previous replacement (touchscreen failure) prompting my gf to ask the Apple ‘genius’ if my latest replacement is actually my original iphone

Admittedly, I am an Apple evangelist and own some stocks. But this brand is going through some growing pains and it starts with customer service.

Scenario: You wake up on a Saturday morning and your touchscreen does not work, you reboot like 10x and the touchscreen is still completely dead, transparent to you of course because you think that continuously rebooting the software will make it go away.

I don’t know how capacative touchscreen works, but i know its cool (for similar humor try this quote from Zoolander). Abstractions aside, that Saturday morning I realized when you put your brand on the line as a mobile phone (basically your public communication ID) — you also need to approach customer service experiences from a telco point of view, not an IT point of view.

As a non-pro care member, which basically means I can’t just walk up to the Apple retail store and say: “Hey, I can’t receive or send calls from my iPhone…because my touchscreen is dead”. Instead I have to use a computer, sign up as a “guest” in the iPod queue and pick a date and a time slot to claim my troubleshoot ticket to my local Apple genius.

As a geek, i think an ATM like scheduler user interface to book your Apple genius is cool for IT requests, but when I could only choose Sunday (the next day) to service my phone over the weekend! Funk dat By the way, I did try the other retail locations and actually had technical difficulties with the scheduling application itself adding fuel to el fuego.

Adamantly, I went to the store Saturday morning anyways and presented my case waited approximately 1hr and got a replacement. The lesson here for me is that Apple is getting bigger and losing some intimacy with the loyal Apple consumers. Back in the day premium customer service membership like Pro Care was standard — that is what separated Apple from rest.

Another lesson overall from a user experience point of view is that customer service scenarios for phone service trump digital appliance troubleshooting issues.