I experienced two quite different sides of Apple today - the Steve Jobs keynote, and a personal experience with my troublesome MacBook.

The keynote was everything you would expect it to be - well choreographed, lots of big announcements, the best left for last and so on. Even despite all the rumors, there were still some surprises in there, and the crowd seemed genuinely appreciative of the new applications which were demoed, even though those demos did seem to go on a bit long. The iPhone 3G is, like its predecessor, a phenomenal device, and when I hear people say it doesn’t do anything differently or better than other phones out there, I just find myself wondering if they’ve ever actually seen one up close and played with it. The thing is in a league of its own for me, in terms of design, user interface, browsing experience, email, applications and so on. The only things preventing me from getting one previously were speed, price, and the sense that a better version would probably turn up soon. Come 11 July, I’ll be first in line at my local AT&T store.

On the other hand, my personal experience with Apple over the last few months has been wretched. My hard drive failed a few weeks ago, and the process of getting it fixed was tedious to say the least. I had to make an appointment for technical support at my local store, they determined the hard drive had failed, but wanted to charge me to copy my files off it. So I declined, did it myself back at home, but then had to make another appointment to take it back in. Picked it up a few days later only to discover when I got home that they had forgotten to install iLife on it. Took it back again, etc. Finally got it home, reinstalled everything, moved images, music etc. back onto it, finally had everything back the way I like it, and then today had the same early symptoms as last time pop up again. The thing no longer starts under Mac OS X, only Vista.

So I called technical support, since my local store had no technical support slots left today, and spent a total of 2 hours or more on the phone with various different people trying to convince them that simply repeating the process I went through last time wasn’t going to reassure me that this wasn’t going to happen again. Their standard policy is that they will fix a device 3 times before allowing you to receive a replacement, even if it’s a hard-drive failure as it has been twice now for me. It wasn’t until I had kept some poor customer service person on the phone for a good 45 minutes repeating over and over again that the solution she was proposing was unacceptable that she finally transferred me to someone with more clout who was willing to concede that giving me a new machine was the right thing to do.

The contrast between these two experiences - the real excitement associated with a new product launch from Apple, and the sheer frustration involved with being a customer when a product goes wrong - almost couldn’t be greater. Is this the same company? Yes. But does their customer service match the high expectations they create through their carefully choreographed keynotes, flawless demos and clever advertising at the expense of the hapless PC? I’m not so sure.

I’ve had a variety of experiences with Verizon recently - two this week, in fact - as a consumer, that have reminded me of the importance of consistency.

We are Verizon customers for all our home services - TV, Internet and phone (I use a VoIP service from Vonave for my home office). In Boston, we signed up for FiOS broadband and then TV as soon as those options became available, and the experience was great from start to finish. Our set top box conked out at one point and someone quickly came to replace it. Even my wife loved the service, and she’s inherently skeptical of technology.

So, when we moved to New Jersey, we wanted FiOS again, but it wasn’t available. So we went with the local cable company until FiOS was available a couple of months after we moved in. We ordered it on a Wednesday, it was installed on a Friday evening, and by midnight on Friday both the Internet and telephone services had gone down. Not good news. So I called Verizon and asked them to come and fix it. To cut a long story short, it took four days and four calls to technical support to get someone out to fix it. It was a holiday weekend and the biggest problem was that the Verizon technical support people simply weren’t able to reach anyone in the local offices here in New Jersey to arrange an appointment. They had to keep promising to call me back, which they never did. The whole thing was hugely aggravating and a big contrast from our experience in Boston.

Then, this past weekend, there was a thunderstorm on Saturday evening and at one point we heard and saw a very loud and bright lightning strike very close to the house. It later turned out that it had been close enough to have fried both the guts of our FiOS service and our FiOS set top box, such that all our services were down. It was late by the time we figured this out, but I called Verizon to set up something for Sunday or Monday. At that point I was told the wait to talk to a representative was long, but I used an automated system to record the fact that I was having trouble, and was informed that someone would contact me by noon on Sunday to rectify the situation. I provided my cellphone number and hung up. However, no contact by mid-afternoon on Sunday and so I called again. The same automated system again tried to persuade me that it would provide better service than a human being and came up with the response, “we are committed to fixing your service by Sunday. Is there anything else?” This wasn’t terribly helpful, since I hadn’t told anyone what the problem was, let alone arranged a time and date to have it fixed. So I said yes, there was something else, and got to talk to a person. They arranged for someone to come the next day (Monday) and sure enough someone was here by 10am and fixed everything by noon. Although the IVR system still leaves something to be desired, they got things fixed quickly, the guy who came was efficient and professional, and we were very pleased.

Then, on Tuesday, we were meant to have a new set top box installed. I had found the online ordering system too vague to be sure I would get what I wanted, and so I called to place the order. I told the person I talked to that I had seen online appointments were available on the following Tuesday, and we arranged to have the installation done then. I was given a four-hour window and and order number and hung up. That window came and went yesterday but no-one showed up. So I called, and was first passed around three different people, each of whom merely told me they were putting me on hold (not transferring me) and I had to re-explain my situation every time. Ultimately, I found someone who didn’t transfer me while on hold and she told me first that they had no record of my order at all, and then that the local office had it booked in for a Tuesday two weeks away (apparently, data entry error on the part of the person taking the order). So they apologized and asked me when I would like to reschedule the installation for. I gave them some dates and they said someone would contact me to let me know when it would be. Then, today, a set top box arrived in the mail. No letter, no explanation, just an STB.

What the heck? Why isn’t the service we have sometimes received from Verizon the service we receive all the time? And how hard can it be to get this basic stuff right? If Verizon were consistently as good as they sometimes are, we’d be phenomenally happy. But since they screw up in some way at least once out of every two times I need something from them, we’re decidedly unhappy. Unfortunately the cable company is no better, so we’re somewhat stuck. But there has to be a better way, and I would hope that Verizon, which has lowered its churn to industry-leading levels on the wireless side, can find a way to keep its wireline customers just as happy.

David Pogue has a nice (or awful, depending on your perspective) example from one of his readers of woeful tech support, delivered via one of those “live chat” applications which are springing up all over the place. When combined with the remote delivery of said tech support (in this case, the tech support guy’s name was purportedly “Sean” but who knows whether he was sitting in New York or New Delhi) this makes for some bad results. I’ve certainly had several of these experiences myself, which can mix the worst of IM/SMS jargon and generally bad English.

This is another of those examples where the internally-facing (or at least shareholder-facing) prerogative to save money on customer support is in conflict with the external-(customer)-facing prerogative of customer satisfaction. Live chat can be a boon - since it’s live you rarely have to wait, in comparison with call centres. But it can also make for a much worse experience once you actually get going. And more than once I’ve been told that I need to chat or even talk with a different department once I’m halfway through the live chat I thought would get me what I needed. More thought needed from all the companies involved in this stuff.