I recently emailed Apple's iTunes support team because a movie I had rented from iTunes stubbornly refused to leave my iPad. A short while later I received an email response from Stanley. It was a long (obviously canned) email but the main point was "That's an iPad issue and I don't handle that; you'll need to contact the iPad people."

Arrrrgh!

I don't blame Stanley. He's probably doing his job exactly the way he's been told to do it.

I do, however, blame the corporate architect who decide to build and reinforce customer aggravating silos. The service procedures were designed to be efficient since Stanley only needs to know how to resolve iTunes issues while someone can be an iPad expert. The problem is the customer has to pay for that 'efficiency' by spending more of their time on the problem.

As long as the company is still called Apple, I'd expect a bit more help when I contact Apple to resolve a problem with an Apple product. In the end, it took me about five more minutes of searching through links and discussion boards to find the answer to my problem. Yes, that's not a lot of time, but it also left me feeling that I'm not important enough for Stanley, Apple Representative, to spend five extra minutes finding the answer to my question.

Consider carefully before you build a silo in your company!

PS. I still love my iPad, but I just bought a PC instead of a Mac.