Author: Warner Crocker

The story from Paris Buttfield-Addison about losing 20 years of his digital life due to a hacked gift card broke last week when I was watching my grandkids. I was able to follow along but didn’t have time to comment, but it certainly flashed me back to some issues I have had with Apple in the past. The good news is that it appears that someone from Apple’s Executive Relations solved the issue.

If you aren’t up on the story the quick summary is that Paris Buttfield-Addison attempted to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card he had recently purchased from a third party retailer. The card had been tampered with. Apple’s system saw it as problematic and disabled his 25-year old account. After frustrating attempts to resolve the situation Buttfield-Addison blogged about his situation, which was picked up by much of the Apple press. That in turn prompted action which escalated the situation to the Executive Relations Team. You can read all about it here.

As I said, the good news is that the account was eventually restored.

The bad news is that it took the pressure from exposure online to solve the issue. What’s good is that the story was picked up enough to generate that pressure. Often that’s not the case.

I can testify to that from two events in my Apple experiences. Both of which required escalation to the executive level. The second one requiring intervention from Craig Federighi after I had all but given up hope. You can read about that adventure here. It took quite a while to get that issue resolved, one that lasted through several operating system revisions.

The worse news is that increasingly if you have an issue with Apple (or any other large company for that matter) that falls outside their prescribed systems of support you really have to be either lucky or damned persistent to get a resolution. There’s an old saying that if you have one employee you have an employee problem. That applies to customers also. If you have one, you have a customer relations problem. To be fair in a company as large as Apple it has to be tough to mitigate these kind of issues given the very large number of users.

But if you smash those old sayings about employees and customers together the resolution dynamic can easily become untenable. It shouldn’t. The fact that large companies have to have an Executive Relations Team speaks to failures in management. Anyone remember Comcast Cares on Twitter? Great that it existed. An admitted failure that it had to.

When a company anticipates potential breakdowns and devotes resources to solving problems its existing customer support systems can’t handle, the dog is chasing its tail. One has to assume the resources devoted to Executive Relations Teams solving issues that regular customer support systems can’t must be less expensive than addressing the flaws in existing customer support mechanisms. At least I hope that’s the case. The alternative is that a company just doesn’t care.

To be fair, there will obviously be issues that can’t be anticipated that require some method of higher level oversight to be corrected. Customers can only hope that leads to better support further down the line once an out of the ordinary problem arises. Unique problems crop up all the time and rules and regulations get changed to deal with them. But setting up barriers to problem solving creates its own set of problems.

With more and more companies adopting AI solutions to help with customer service and support, it makes one wonder if we’ll end up with AI Executive Relations Teams made up of AI engines solving problems AI support created in the first place. But I imagine it will fall back to humans.

Assuming you can reach one without needing allies in the media to help make your case.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.