Apple reviews

Deceptive management/training, told during training that flexing up to full time would only last a couple weeks but was untrue-- turned out to be mandatory overtime lasted over half a year with a full time schedule that was out of your control. Told that you have 100% call control, if 100% call control means having to follow a guide to do forced and scripted scenarios with management and told to use those same scenarios over calls (forced empathy is most uncomfortable) thats a shame. Told that you could do lateral movement to departments after a year of employment....out of the 20+ or so out of my training class only 4-5 survived the burn-out 1 has moved to a Senior Advisor role and the rest are stuck in whatever call que Apple puts them in against their will. High burnout rate, If you look at AHA reviews on Glass door 80%+ of them haven't been with the company longer than a year and most are fresh out of training/nesting where they hype you up so much for how awesome the job is but the new car smell wears off after about 5-6 months of getting beat up on the phones. Direct team management is hit or miss, some will take credit for something they had nothing to do with. (I contacted HR about 2 different issues and both took credit for a decision in my favor AFTER I contacted HR). Some will openly pacify and lie to you out job openings within the company and give you false direction then you call them out on it and met with more lies and deception. Direct support while on a call is a joke, you either fumble on the call for 30+min and get a bad stat. Escalate to a Tier 2 Advisor who rarely wants to take the escalated call and get a bad stat or you put the customer on hold for 5+ min praying someone will answer you question in chat which NEVER Happens. Don't bother asking your team manager either, lunches...personal breaks, real life issues and them just not being there the majority of the unsavory hours and times you work (i.e Nights and weekends). Initial training was fine, it was paid..in depth and had multiple mentoring sessions with great Q&A and lasted well over a month. Getting trained AFTER That is a joke, read some articles and self guided learning and lead you to the wolves, its a disaster and your performance will suffer and feed into any uncertainty you had about getting into your "new" role as well compounding your new found dislike for the proceedings. Apple HIGHLY...HIGHLY advises not to talk about your job with anyone during your training courses, they even suggest not putting it in facebook. Its really a cleaver tactic not just to save themselves the rumors that float around major tech forums/websites but sites like these where people get scared to leave bad reviews on sites like Glassdoor. Nobody will care about a glowing review about Apple but they might think twice about leaving a bad one because of what they saw in training...well played Apple. Company discount, you get a fair % and cash discount once every 3 years. Outisde of that its a joke--they want us to be proficient in the equipment we are supporting but they can't give us a device at cost once a year. Work/Life balance is a joke, if you are right out of training get ready for some of the worst schedules you can imagine. Nights...weekends, you name it. With stats you can juke it can improve some but you are going to have to work a full shift on a weekend none the less more than likely.

However, as anyone born in the last three decades might realize, Apple also does not lead the market in terms of operating system brand or affordability. As a result, most prospective Apple employees (whether direct or through a vendor) need to have some degree of experience with their products before providing service to their customers, or it’s going to be an uphill battle. * Inadequate training curriculum. Now, I know what you might be thinking; this is where Apple’s responsibility might be blurred with the vendor’s responsibility, since the vendor – as a contractor – provides its own trainers and can make its own adaptations to the training process for its agents. Nevertheless, Apple clearly intends for its vendors to use their proprietary training process (known as “New Advisor Training – Academy”) inside a portal known as iDesk in order to complete the training process. --- It lasts several weeks, but the training itself involves very few simulations or interaction on the part of the student. Most of the training consists of boring, unengaging lectures from classroom instructors who go through a slide show presentation. --- Those of us who net less than $20k a year tend not to be familiar with Apple’s product line. This means that something as innocuous as swiping back or going to the ‘settings’ area on an iOS device can be hard to understand or describe because it’s just “one of those things” you have to PRACTICE in order to remember. Training might be able to fill the gaps, but with very little hands-on practice of any kind (even simulated), most of the information just goes in one ear and out the other. Aggravating this situation is the fact that my employer (Apple’s vendor) - Kelly Services - never provided the promised iPod that we could use to familiarize ourselves with the product line we would be supporting. * Poor support structure. Just like many other call center projects, Apple has an additional level of support known as Tier 2. This queue consists entirely of agents who are supposedly the “best of the best” and are there to support customers and the agents on the frontline. In contrast to other projects, however, agents are actually allowed to reach out to Tier 2 for help when they aren’t comfortable handling a call. Apple itself makes getting help very hard, however – even for newer agents. --- Apple tracks the number of times agents reach out to Tier 2 for support. I don’t know how the other vendors do things, but Kelly Services held agents accountable to this metric right from the start. To keep Tier 2 escalations low, agents would be strongly encouraged to reach out to local management and chat support for assistance. --- Even if agents just needed to ask a question or get help with a call instead of escalating, the very act of dialing Tier 2’s line would count as an “escalation” for purposes of the “Tier 2 Escalations” metric. While I can understand the potential for abuse of phone consultations as a method to avoid customer interactions, this puts unnecessary stress on frontline agents – especially newbie agents – who could be panicking because they don’t know what the heck they’re doing. --- Tier 2 also seems to have an attitude problem. Agents on the line don’t generally assume good faith in Tier 1 agents and tend to leave Tier 1 agents with the impression that the act of escalating is an inconvenience. As a former Tier 2 phone agent and Team Lead on another project, I understand how frustrating it can be to get agents who don’t use their tools before calling in; however, this lack of willingness to assist discourages Tier 1 agents from asking for help and hurts customer satisfaction. With such a poor training process in place, reaching out to an additional level of support really should not be such an involved process. --- Adding even more stress to the situation is the fact that Tier 2 agents give “peer feedbacks,” which are basically reviews on the Tier 1 agent’s performance. So, as a Tier 1 agent: if a Tier 2 agent is miffed because their 30 minutes of ‘available’ time is interrupted with your phone call, there’s nothing stopping them from giving you a negative peer feedback. --- To my utter amazement, Apple also mixes all of its Tier 2 agents from multiple vendors into one gigantic queue – a very unusual practice for a call center, in my experience. So, when you reach out for help, you might get a Tier 2 agent from your own employer, or it could be someone from one of Apple’s many vendors – all of whom have their own policies, techniques, and personalities. This is just additional inconsistency to further complicate an already convoluted support process. * Ineffective tools. iLog, the application that allows Apple’s support agents to connect with and assist customers, tries to be an all-in-one tool for agents to efficiently assist customers. However, it, too, has its shortcomings. --- The knowledge base (“Knowledge Center”) is a collection of how-to articles and procedural documentation agents use to support customers. However, agents must rely entirely on keyword searches or a list of article suggestions (based on how agents classify their case) when finding relevant resources. There’s no menu or organized list of topics from which to drill-down. Additionally, some questions on simpler topics are only available in product manuals, which requires a PDF file download – further extending the call’s average handle time, harming agent confidence, and lowering customer satisfaction. * Strange quality expectations. Apple’s approach to empathy and rapport-building is embodied in something it coins the “Three A’s,” which are: Acknowledge, Align, and Assure. Agents with Kelly Services routinely miss “Align” in quality evaluations. Sometimes, agents overlook empathy during their phone calls and don’t use the right voice inflection; in Apple’s case, however, I think empathy is more complex than it needs to be. Most call centers – even the ones who use NPS and follow a CARES quality model – combine or link acknowledgement and “alignment” together. So, a simple statement such as, “we want to get your screen repaired so that touch functionality works normally” combines acknowledgement and empathy in one simple statement. Apple’s idea of empathy (or “alignment”), however, is “I would feel that way too” statements, which tend to patronize the customer – especially on calls with very simple issues.