It’s been said that, “Whatever technology enables, happens.”
But although modern technology enables technology support to be provided, superbly, it doesn’t appear to be happening. Technology support from lots of people and organisations – organisations like Telstra and Apple – is far from superb, it’s abysmal. It seems to us that, for every person and organisation that provides superb support, there are 50 that don’t.
Recently it was reported that, after spending hours and hours trying to get help with their technology problems from Telstra, a guy decided to stage a sit-in in a Telstra store, with his girlfriend, as a last resort. Typically, even this didn’t result in him getting any proper support – all Telstra did was call the Police to eject them from their premises. And it’s said that the Police that came provided them with more help with their technology problems than Telstra did. So funny, but serious!
As for Apple, we’ve recently learnt that Apple stores don’t have ordinary email addresses or email forms to seek information from them, or to make complaints – all you can do is use Australia Post to send them “snail mails!!!” One of our readers reports that he recently spent 25 minutes with a Genius Bar person and didn’t get a solution for a problem he was experiencing, but then got help from another source which enabled him to solve the problem he’d been trying to solve, in 2 minutes.
Modern technology makes superb support possible. So why is it happening so seldom?
We believe the answer is simple – it’s because of cost.
Our strong recommendation is that we, the people, should, whenever possible, only deal with people and organisations who have ordinary email addresses and who have people whose job it is to provide reasonable responses to reasonable emails sent to them. But people who can provide reasonable responses to reasonable emails have to be intelligent, knowledgable and experienced and such people don’t come cheaply. And so we have organisations like Apple and Telstra seeking to be successful without such people.
(There may be another factor in this. We’ve recently read that serving people in stores like David Jones and Officeworks etc. etc. etc. is being increasingly regarded as a low grade occupation. Perhaps this is an additional factor in why it seems to be increasingly hard to find anyone to serve you in stores like David Jones and Officeworks etc. etc. etc. And perhaps answering peoples emails is increasingly being regarded as a low grade occupation?? Perhaps there are less and less people prepared to spend their lives answering emails??)
We believe the future is going to be all about, on the one hand, more and more people looking for people and organisations who have ordinary email addresses and who have people associated with them, perhaps in their employ or otherwise, whose job it is to provide reasonable responses to reasonable emails sent using these ordinary email addresses, and, on the other hand, people and organisations doing their best to be successful without having ordinary email addresses and without having such people associated with them.
Our aim is to find more of the former, and to publicise them on this blog.
A comment or a question? Email us at info@questionsmisc.info.