American based, for american customers - and email.

That's pretty much the price of excellent service these days.  If you outsource your service to a place that doesn't care about your customers and you don't provide real person to person communication, you're headed down the road of automaton disengagement and your customers will feel it.

Apple aced this today - and won my continued loyalty despite the product in question being largely ineffective for the purpose for which it is named - that is making phone calls!

It has been a running joke for seven months at the office, my iPhone does everything I need, I love it and carry it everywhere - except it doesn't make phone calls.  A definite entrant into the It Works Awesome Except it Doesn't, hall of fame, my iPhone has litterally been pathetic at keeping phone calls alive.  About 1 in 5 calls I make or receive fail or are disconnected.  

Unfortunately when you call, the representatives are trained to basically give you the run around.  Granted they can't know if a caller even knows how to turn the phones on, so they have to go through lot's of basic steps.  So i played along and did all the resets and reboots and replaced my SIM card and just basically accepted my AT&T fate.

But finally I had accumulated enough frustration around the failed calls that I called Apple again and to make it short, they were happy to give me a new phone, which from the anecdotes I hear has a good chance of fixing my reception problem.

I could be pissed they didn't send me a phone in the first place, but I think it's impressive I got a knowledgeable tech in Oregon within 3 minutes of calling.  (TJ tells me they have 85 reps there and on overage 100 reps in 14 locations across the US - interesting numbers I think).

Then he sends me to a Senior Customer Service rep and guess what, her name is Arma "Popcorn" and she actually gives me her personal email address if I ever have problems.  How cool is that?  Suddenly Apple is giving me a relationship instead of a machine.

I'll still love my iPhone now even if it still doesn't make calls.

Sometimes in IT you just have to believe...