Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [28]
When a customer asked Steve in 2008 why BlackBerry owners could tether their phones to their computers for wireless Internet access but the same could not be done with an iPhone, Steve wrote, “We agree, and are discussing it with ATT.” The feature eventually came. Asked about tethering an iPhone to an iPad on AT&T, Steve replied only, “No.” Steve consoled another AT&T customer, Mark Trapp, who expressed his frustration over his cell carrier’s plans to discontinue unlimited data plans. “I think its going to work out just fine for almost all customers. Try it,” Steve wrote, but he was less supportive in a message to another customer, Dennis Wurster, about the same matter: “It’s between you and ATT.”
Steve’s proclivity for responding to e-mails, and the reputation that came with that, made his inbox a prominent target for customers looking to overstep rows of supervisors to get broken computers replaced and generous credit for service outages. This approach intensified as his legendary reputation and Apple’s customer base grew, and Apple took notice and repurposed the messages to be used as data points for internal use, evidenced by the MobileMe chart showing customer complaints.
Long before that, however, Steve was extraordinarily embedded in handling customer complaints. On October 11, 1999, not long after Steve returned to a dying company and took on the title of interim CEO, he fielded an inquiry from a customer named David about iBook laptop shortages. “We are doing the best we can with a limited supply (which is finally now increasing). Please remember that some of the first pre-orders came from CompUSA,” Steve wrote.
Dozens of stories have floated around the Web about the times when an e-mail to Steve Jobs yielded a phone call from an executive support team and an outcome that far exceeded reasonable expectations. In 1999, a customer got his G4 Tower desktop repaired after an e-mail to Steve resulted in a phone call from the oft-referenced Executive Relations team. In 2001, a student software developer was told by Apple support that, despite his sob story about dropping the hard drive connected to his laptop causing damage, they couldn’t resolve an issue that resulted from physical abuse. After writing to the CEO, he got a call from one of Steve’s associates who asked him several questions and then tempered his expectations by saying similarly that he did not meet the standards for a comped repair. But a month passed after he took his computer in for repairs, and there was still no charge from Apple. The customer recalled on a message board: “I contacted the support people, and they said the charges had been waived by ‘someone higher up.’ Uncle Steve must be smiling on me.”
In 2006, Steve was initially defensive toward someone who had written to complain that the new PowerBook did not include a free copy of the iLife software suite. Steve asked if the computer itself was not good enough, and the customer said it was fantastic but that iLife would make it perfect. Soon, he received a copy of the software, as did every other person who purchased the computer. After a 2007 message to Steve, with the business watchdog blog the Consumerist copied on the e-mail, the sender got his laptop replaced alongside his damaged laptop so that he could copy files over from its hard drive. In 2010, a Chinese app maker was mugged in San Francisco while attending Apple’s developer conference.