Talk Without Speaking

Good: If you’re a Mac user then you’ve no doubt heard about the Apple Music Service which enabled a store inside of iTunes. You can download songs for $0.99 (US) or whole albums for $9.99. Apparently there were over 275,000 songs downloaded from the service within the first 24 hours of operation. Don’t you wish you had a company which could pull in a quarter of a million dollars in a single day?

Bad: The service is not available in Canada yet and there’s been no word about when it might conceivable be available. Although I realize that there are likely all kinds of licensing issues surrounding being able to download intellectual property internationally I wish they would make some statement letting international users know was is going on or even when they might let us know what is going on. Setting expectation is a Good Thing. Apple’s total silence on the subject certainly makes me feel like a second class citizen.

Ugly: I decided to go on a bit of a quest for information regarding when the service might be available in Canada so I decided to go for the horse’s mouth and called Apple Canada. When I asked about the availability of the service in Canada I was politely transferred; I felt like I was getting somewhere. However, I ended up speaking with the Apple Store.

“Can you tell me when the service is going to be available in Canada?”
“No announcement has been made, we advise that you keep checking our website for announcements.”
“You want me to continually check your website?”
“That’s what we’ve been told to say. I can’t speculate.”
“But if you were to speculate, what would you think?”
“<click>”

Yes, that’s right - he hung up on me. Ok - so you can’t speculate but you can still be polite about it. Regardless of what I say it’s never good customer service to hang up on the customer. I work in customer service and I the only time I would hang up on someone is if they were abusive and swearing and I would still temper it with, “I’m sorry that I can’t help you; please feel free to call back when you are calmer”, or something to that effect. I’m as loyal as any Apple user out there but that loyalty is not indestructible.