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The iPhone iFiascoThe iPhone iFiasco
Customer satisfaction is the foundation of Apple's recent success. Many companies treat their customers like cattle, but that's not how Apple rolls. Apple's customers love their products. And that's why Friday's fiasco at stores selling the iPhone 3G is a real crisis.
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Customer satisfaction is the foundation of Apple's recent success. Many companies treat their customers like cattle, but that's not how Apple rolls. Apple's customers love their products. And that's why Friday's fiasco at stores selling the iPhone 3G is a real crisis.I wrote about my own seven-hour ordeal buying an iPhone 3G. I didn't suffer alone; the people who tried to buy an iPhone 3G at the same time as I did in San Diego had the same experience I did. And it wasn't just San Diego, either: Blogs and news sites are reporting people having problems all over America and Europe buying the iPhone 3G and upgrading their existing iPhones and iPod Touches to the iPhone 2.0 software. Apple.com forums are filled with complaints, as my colleague Tom Claburn noted. Crowds persisted into Sunday.
The iTunes server buckled Friday under the load of people trying to upgrade old devices and register new ones. My colleague Eric Zeman, like many other Apple users, was unable to activate either one of his iPhones for three hours on Friday.
Gizmodo had a comprehensive early report Friday morning, when the iPhone had been on sale in Japan and Europe for most of a day, and on the American East Coast for several hours already. It called the disaster "the iPocalypse," and wrote a catalog of problems in Atlanta, Houston, New Jersey, Ohio, Des Moines, Illinois, San Antonio, New York, and Canada. Gizmodo blamed the problem on the iPhone 2.0 firmware update going out to previous iPhone users at the same time. Many users reported their iPhones were "bricked" -- completely unusable.
Firmware 2.0 isn't like other firmwares in that it needs to update the phone and reauthenticate the service. And in turn, when the servers are slammed and the phone reaches for reauthentication, the server isn't always there to reactivate the service. This is how some of those newly bricked iPhones are occurring, and a source tells us that even first-gen iPhones are susceptible.
A little later on Friday, Ars Technica reported:
Some AT&T stores, such as one in Oak Park, IL (according to Twitter user McCarron), simply turned away customers after the activation system went down. There's nothing like sending cash-flush customers home with nothing. For those at stores that didn't experience a full-on system crash, the process was still very slow. A number of readers reported to us through e-mail and Twitter that they had waited 40 minutes to two hours after doors were opened due to activation woes.These problems aren't just limited to the United States, or to Apple's partner carriers, either. Ars writer Iljitsch van Beijnum is still waiting in line at a Telefónica store in Madrid, despite being physically inside the store for at least an hour and a half now. Iljitsch also pointed us to a post by iPhoneclub.nl that reports T-Mobile stores in the Netherlands are turning customers away because the activation system is down. And, according to TUAW, Apple retail stores have lost connectivity with the iTunes activation system as well.
Meanwhile, stores ran out of stock of iPhones, sending customers home unhappy.
London iPhone buyers faced an added twist to their problems: The U.K. network provider O2 requires the use of Microsoft Internet Explorer for Web activation. That's just amazingly dumb -- require the use of Microsoft software to activate your Apple product? What on Earth were they thinking?
Merlin Mann, editor of the blog 43folders.com, suggests several searches you can run on Twitter to track people's dissatisfaction with their iPhone experiences -- my favorite: "iphone brick OR bricked." He said on Friday:
It's brutal to watch all this and, at least so far, anyway, it feels like a pitiful way to introduce a bunch of enthusiastic new customers to a company that consistently earns its premium from customer experience.
My advice to anyone considering touching any part of this frayed wire today is to stay the hell away. At least until tomorrow or Monday. Wait for things to sort out, back up your .Mac data, and hang out until things start to settle down.
And, if you have a brick, don't play with it. Wait. Don't fiddle. People get weird at times like this and end up doing stupid stuff to make it worse.
Some of these problems are just par for the course. People expect to stand in line to buy the latest hot product from Apple, same as they do for a brand-new Xbox, or hot concert or sporting event tickets.
But this time, Apple has gone too far. It compounded customer hassles through negligence and failure to anticipate demand. And it hassled people who didn't want to play the hot-new-product game -- existing iPhone and iPod Touch owners who just wanted to download the new software version and install it.
Another company might be able to simply shrug this debacle off. Many companies don't care a lot about customer service. Sure, every company pays lip service to customer service, but, for many companies, lip service is where customer service ends. Anybody who's flown on a commercial airplane in the last 15 years can attest to that.
But Apple is different. Customer satisfaction is the only reason that Apple thrives -- it's the only reason the company even survives. If people want products that are just pretty good, they can buy from the other guys. Linux and other open source technologies provide infinitely more customizability than Apple's proprietary offerings. Apple needs to live up to its slogan -- "It just works." It's a matter of survival.
What does Apple need to do now?
Well, some kind of apology would be nice, along with a bit of cash to compensate customers who had problems with activation, similar to the gift certificates Apple gave out last year when they cut iPhone prices too much too fast and left customers feeling ripped off.
But more important, Apple needs to sit down and figure out what went wrong on Friday, and make sure it never happens again.
Update Monday, 7/14 5:35 pm EDT: After I posted the preceding, Apple revealed that it sold 1 million iPhone 3Gs and users downloaded 10 million apps in the iPhone 3G's first weekend of availability. But the weekend was still a fiasco for many of the people who tried to buy iPhones. If Apple wants to continue having that kind of success, it has to clean up its act.
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