A Reddit user yesterday described an interesting experience he recently had with Apple customer service. After downloading iOS 8 this week, Reddit user Kiggsworthy and his wife set up Family Sharing and discovered that they could not download content purchased by the other -- which is effectively the entire point of Family Sharing in the first place.
So Kiggsworthy took to Twitter where he tweeted about the problem whereupon an Apple employee asked him for a DM so he could help figure out what was going wrong and how to fix it.
Via DM, he then worked with me to isolate the problem. I discovered that not all content was giving me that error, only a subset. He got excited saying this is something they've been trying to track down but were not able to reproduce. Apparently I gave them the reproduction scenario he needed.
Turns out it was some subset of iTunes content that was uploaded over 8 years ago in a bad format that Family Sharing wasn't playing nice with. They now know what bad content to look for and are going about putting re-encoded versions of all this media on their servers so that people will not get this error going forward.
With the problem fixed, the two got to talkin'. The Apple employee explained that Apple has a "war room" set up where they scour through various social media platforms looking for iOS 8 bugs and problems being reported by users.
I was telling him how surprised and impressed I was with this service, given how busy a day Apple was having, for them to just see something I tweeted (I don't even have 300 followers) and follow up with me so quickly. He said that they had a "War Room" at Apple trawling through social media and everything they could find looking for anyone having issues (particularly with Family Sharing) so they could address them ASAP.
In a similar vein, Apple also has a crack team of engineers who stay on high alert on iPhone launch day, keeping a close eye on any problems that might arise so that they can quickly enact fixes at the manufacturing level.
BloombergBusinessweek profiled the group two weeks ago:
Within hours of a new phone's release, couriers start bringing defective returns from Apple's retail stores to the company's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. In a testing room, the same engineers who built the iPhone try to figure out the problem, say former employees who have participated in the program and don't want to anger their former employer. "They take them apart to diagnose what's happening right then and there," says Mark Wilhelm, who helped lead Apple's returns program.
The program, created in the late 1990s, is called early field failure analysis, or EFFA, and it's about as fun as it sounds. The idea is to keep easily resolved problems from becoming punch lines for late-night comics. Often, they jury-rig a hardware fix, then coordinate a solution across Apple's global supply chain.
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