Which really means "we don't care if you're unhappy, we care if other people know you're unhappy" :(

Maybe instead of thinking of it as some sort of decline in service we should consider it as a net improvement in global communication. Media has democratized and you don't even need to convince the local TV news crew to cover your story anymore.

You can just make a clear, coherent complaint in your own forum and occasionally [like in this case] it actually brings about a transformation.

I doubt that Apple's customer service is any worse now than it was before.

I'd like to think that is the case... When I was a child, we got a phone number that was one digit away from the number of a major hospital. That would have been bad enough, but Norway had area codes that covered very small areas at the time, and were optional within the area. Lots of people didn't remember the area code and so always used it, but would guess based on location of the person they dialled. The one digit difference was in the area code..

As a result we started getting calls about medical emergencies in the middle of the night.

The local phone company did not see this as a problem either for us or the hospital or people calling with emergencies, but offered to put us on a waiting list (!) potentially for months before they could be bothered to change the number.

Until my dad had hounded the reporters at the local newspaper until they wrote a piece about it - suddenly it was fixed within a day or two.

So public attention worked back then too (this was early 80's) - there was just fewer outlets and more work to get your problems published.

These days it doesn't take much before I go for social media.

Another option I've found works (but is pricey) is to sign up (temporarily if you don't otherwise need it) for one of LinkedIn's premium tiers and use that to get access to top execs at the company you have an issue with. Often the issue is not so much to draw public attention, but that drawing public attention is the simplest way of getting the attention of and access to a senior enough executive.

> Often the issue is not so much to draw public attention, but that drawing public attention is the simplest way of getting the attention of and access to a senior enough executive.

I really believe that's true and wish it could be applied in more cases. Basically spread the problem to people who are normally not affected by it.

I would bet that TSA queues would get solved in ~2 months if all government workers and politicians (to the highest position) were excluded from TSA precheck and could not pay for priority queues.

That's what spurred me to try LinkedIn when DHL messed me about - I'd had success getting issues solved when senior people happened to have their attention brought to my blog or whinin on Twitter, so I figured I'd try removing the middleman, at the cost of spending money instead. It was an interesting experience (especially as I got cc'd on some very interesting e-mails where people where told to fix my problem...). But that was a relatively easy situation that "just" required the attention of a couple of SVPs. Finding ways of drawing attention to more serious issues is a lot trickier.

> You can just make a clear, coherent complaint in your own forum and occasionally [like in this case] it actually brings about a transformation.

But only if you have enough followers or readership.

The Ars Technica writers have often remarked about feeling guilty for taking advantage of this privilege. They try to resolve things, then after failing, mention they're going to write a story about things, and suddenly get the VIP treatment. But not everyone can write an article for a major news site.

But you can tag their Twitter account.

Does this always work? Is it going to be somebody's job to monitor all tagged tweets?

I'd say it means that the social team monitoring twitter has more power to get shit done* than the CSRs manning the phones.

*in this case meaning escalate to product teams or get the attention of executives

Isn't that the same though? If you people who listen to you privately can do less than people who listen to your public statements, I think it goes back to my original argument. The company empowers people who can stop bad news rather than those who can make you happy.

I wonder if it's part of a longer-term strategy to get people to ignore online complaints altogether. At some point, when it becomes commonplace to tweet about problems instead of calling, it'll be substantially more difficult for horror stories to "go viral".

The more likely explanation is that PR teams are horrified at the prospect of something "going viral" and don't know how to tell what will and what won't, so they work to resolve any potential issue before it can blow up.

Or maybe: we care if it registers to our radar, because else we get tens of thousands of unhappy people complaining to us everyday -- and most are just ignorant of how it works, unhappy for no reason, have installed all kinds of crap and done custom changes that broke their system, etc.

Hasn't this always been the case? It's why the Better Business Bureau exists.