Apple Plans to Stop Providing Customer Support on Twitter and YouTube

[oldMacGenius]

This is true for employees as well. Many of us who have held out and stayed in social media have some these conditions. Those who do not found other roles with more pay and took those. Which is why everyone is so upset.

I believe you.

Tim Cook loves the flexibility of outsourcing, and this is the playbook that Apple loves to use. Break up, divide and conquer.

Indeed, being from operations, he made a career out of outsourcing and offshoring various aspects of his division. Be it Manufacturing, logistics, supply chain management, and all the way to facilities and Security - outsourcing these things is of course the preferred approach. Jack Welch would even wish he could build a company as successful while also offshoring and outsourcing.

As AppleCare started under Ops, it suffers from the same kind of mindset: less operations to manage internally is good. But with great cost center savings comes great risk and little flexibility.

If you can’t manage your own operations and remain profitable at doing them, how long will it be before your customers notice? Fundamentally this is the cost of doing business. What do you have when these responsibilities fall to someone else? Chaos.

Can we expect to get good service from a bunch of “D/B/A’s?” Not especially.

 

[Momof2.1107]

I did not know you can get support on Twitter and YouTube. I always used the support app, and messaged through there.

 

[ricketysquire]

I believe you.

Tim Cook loves the flexibility of outsourcing, and this is the playbook that Apple loves to use. Break up, divide and conquer.

Indeed, being from operations, he made a career out of outsourcing and offshoring various aspects of his division. Be it Manufacturing, logistics, supply chain management, and all the way to facilities and Security - outsourcing these things is of course the preferred approach. Jack Welch would even wish he could build a company as successful while also offshoring and outsourcing.

As AppleCare started under Ops, it suffers from the same kind of mindset: less operations to manage internally is good. But with great cost center savings comes great risk and little flexibility.

If you can’t manage your own operations and remain profitable at doing them, how long will it be before your customers notice? Fundamentally this is the cost of doing business. What do you have when these responsibilities fall to someone else? Chaos.

Can we expect to get good service from a bunch of “D/B/A’s?” Not especially.

Feels like everything is going to crap and companies are increasingly in the business of what I like to call "abstractifying" everything. Outsource support, outsource manufacturing, everything in the damn "cloud" and layers on layers of subcontracting. No one wants to take accountability, no none wants to do anything, no one wants to serve customers, everyone wants to be a damn corporate bureaucrat, a paper pusher. What is business these days? Everything is such a damn abstraction disconnected from reality.

And it pisses me off to the core. These businesses make our food, provide/maintain/build our shelter, create our vehicles, medication, infrastructure, clothing, they have so much power and control over us but they are so damn single minded and obsessed with infinite growth. They'll burn the world and themselves to the ground if it means a couple of pennies more or some number in the sky gets bigger.

 

[phoenix155]

These businesses make our food, provide/maintain/build our shelter, create our vehicles, medication, infrastructure, clothing, they have so much power and control over us but they are so damn single minded and obsessed with infinite growth. They'll burn the world and themselves to the ground if it means a couple of pennies more or some number in the sky gets bigger.

Inflation was >50% because of corporate profit. Business culture needs to change, big time.

 

[displayblock]

Twitter and YouTube make sense, but cutting off providing official support through the Apple Support Community does not make sense to me. Not being able to find public, official answers to niche issues is going to increase the amount they spend on support calls.

Not to mention they’ll lose the ability to correct incorrect guidance from armchair experts.

 

[poseidondev]

Makes sense. Twitter is a cesspool and like many other here, I didn't even realize they provided support via YouTube.

Personally I like reaching out to them via iMessage, it's a shame however that for more complicated matters they often still have to refer to the phone line.

 

[Plutonius]

Inflation was >50% because of corporate profit. Business culture needs to change, big time.

I'm not to sure how you arrived at this conclusion ?

Inflation is caused by too much demand and too little supply.

Eliminating support on social media was done to cut cost.

I expect that Apple will start using A.I. in most of their phone support.

 

[cgs1xx]

The Apple Support Community has been really bad the last 6-7 years. Thousands of people are asking wuestions and noone answers… it was great around 2009-2011, I’d post a question and I would have a good response within minutes or hours.

 

[Crowbot]

The Apple Support Community has been really bad the last 6-7 years. Thousands of people are asking wuestions and noone answers… it was great around 2009-2011, I’d post a question and I would have a good response within minutes or hours.

Yup. That's one reason a lot of us are here. To get and give support. The biggest problem is that we can't get "official" info from Apple.

 

[phoenix155]

I'm not to sure how you arrived at this conclusion ?

Inflation is caused by too much demand and too little supply.

Eliminating support on social media was done to cut cost.

I expect that Apple will start using A.I. in most of their phone support.

Science. I came to the conclusion through reading a research institute’s application of science. Please see the following article. Proper reference (in APA format) is below.

“Since the trough of the COVID-19 recession in the second quarter of 2020, overall prices in the NFC sector have risen at an annualized rate of 6.1%—a pronounced acceleration over the 1.8% price growth that characterized the pre-pandemic business cycle of 2007–2019. Strikingly, over half of this increase (53.9%) can be attributed to fatter profit margins, with labor costs contributing less than 8% of this increase.”

While you’re absolutely right, in “normal” times, inflation is driven by demand outstripping supply, in the most recent case (the pandemic), >50% of it was driven by corporate profits. This isn’t to discount the fact that the Fed pumped Trillions of dollars into the economy, which definitely had an impact, but corporate profits didn’t help either - by a factor of greater than 50%.

Reference

Bivens, J. (2022, April 21). Corporate profits have contributed disproportionately to inflation. How should policymakers respond?

Corporate profits have contributed disproportionately to inflation. How should policymakers respond?

The inflation spike of 2021 and 2022 has presented real policy challenges. In order to better understand this policy debate, it is imperative to look at prices and how they are being affected. The price of just about everything in the U.S. economy can be broken down into the three main...

www.epi.org

 

[guerro]

I wonder, if in addition to eliminating social media support for Twitter, if Tom plans to eliminate social media support for X? I am guessing yes.

 

[Tevosn]

I didn’t know they offered that service on Twitter.

But I can see how it could be beneficial X’ing customer service, or how you say it these days.

 

[Crowbot]

I didn’t know they offered that service on Twitter.

But I can see how it could be beneficial X’ing customer service, or how you say it these days.

Just say Tweet and Twitter. It's Musk's fault for making the new name so silly.

 

[Pinkyyy 💜🍎]

Support via YouTube comments is a thing?

I'm surprised to learn that too. I knew they were making support videos but never knew they would offer actual one-on-one support via YouTube.

I remember leaving a comment on one of their videos because I was having an issue while setting up my iPhone for the first time, and they actually replied to me.. I was very surprised as I was not expecting that

 

[oldMacGenius]

Feels like everything is going to crap and companies are increasingly in the business of what I like to call "abstractifying" everything. Outsource support, outsource manufacturing, everything in the damn "cloud" and layers on layers of subcontracting. No one wants to take accountability, no none wants to do anything, no one wants to serve customers, everyone wants to be a damn corporate bureaucrat, a paper pusher. What is business these days? Everything is such a damn abstraction disconnected from reality.

And it pisses me off to the core. These businesses make our food, provide/maintain/build our shelter, create our vehicles, medication, infrastructure, clothing, they have so much power and control over us but they are so damn single minded and obsessed with infinite growth. They'll burn the world and themselves to the ground if it means a couple of pennies more or some number in the sky gets bigger.

When reporters asked Alan Shepard what he thought about as he sat atop the Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he replied, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.” We’ve adopted the same approach in business. Quality, reliability, robustness? Speed, efficient execution? Cost savings? Generally can only afford to prioritize two of these. Apple used to lean heavily on quality, and executed it well. Now its all about delivering speed at the lowest possible cost.

 

[Crowbot]

When reporters asked Alan Shepard what he thought about as he sat atop the Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he replied, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.” We’ve adopted the same approach in business. Quality, reliability, robustness? Speed, efficient execution? Cost savings? Generally can only afford to prioritize two of these. Apple used to lean heavily on quality, and executed it well. Now its all about delivering speed at the lowest possible cost.

The thing Shepard seemed to miss is that each part was still made to the highest specs possible. Apple seems to have the same credo. How many people have had a sleep switch failure on their phones? I've had every other phone since the first one and never had a switch fail. That is a sign of quality. Sure s*#t happens but Apple products are damn reliable when treated well.