Why has customer service at Apple store declined?

It's over a year since the post by larausmc, and I find myself with the same general question about Apple Customer Service.

My experience concerns recent efforts to get through the phone screening to either an answer or a person who could help me. I wanted to contact the Apple store in Des Moines. I googled the store and dialed the number. I was put through a series of branching choices, none of which fit my problem (I wanted to make a genius bar appointment -- used to be pretty simple), I hung up and tried the Apple web site. I finally got in a text chat which disconnected. I called on the phone again and somehow got a helpful person on the line who told me that if I wanted to speak to someone at the store I had to say "I want to talk to the store manager" when I was asked to press a number. I asked politely how I was supposed to know that I had to say that. The person I talked to was sympathetic and said she fielded problems like mine all the time. I was given another number and managed to make my appointment. Service at the store was, as in the past, excellent.

It seems that Apple is trying to implement a lot of advanced screening to identify and solve problems that are routine. Obviously this has the potential to save the company some money. Maybe they feel a need to worry more about the bottom line in this post-Jobs era. I suggest that if they don't get the screening right that the bottom line will suffer from customer dissatisfaction. They don't have it right yet.

I used to recommend Apple to friends partly because they had such excellent customer service. I don't do that anymore.

Yes originally you could simply walk in, queue and ask any question you wanted all free of charge.

Sadly this is no longer possible and this is mostly down the humongous increase in demand for service at Apple Stores which in turn is down the hundreds of millions of new Apple customers added due to the success of the iPhone. This has/had been made much worse by the fact that for years the only place you could get warranty repairs done to an iPhone or iPad was via an Apple Store and not their resellers.

I can therefore understand why Apple have had to switch to an appointment based system although saying that the system for booking appointments is very bad in multiple ways and if a store is not busy they should have the flexibility to allow drop-in visits to a genius.

I cannot speak from personal experience about other similar cities e.g. New York, but here in London we have two flagship stores and by stretching the definition of 'London' to cover outer boroughs as well seven non-flagship stores. (That is the whole M25 enclosed area.) Quite often every single one will have no appointments available for Mac issues for the entire week ahead - the maximum time window you can book ahead for. It would seem London desperately needs an additional flagship store. How many does New York have?

I would also add that in the early days there was a lot of kudos in being a genius and that these days this is probably not the case.

Your customer service was not declined — you were directed to make an appointment so that the type of question could be better handled by the appropriate staff. If a sales associate is in the process of helping another customer, they should inform you of that, and redirect you to someone else, or if the store is overwhelmed with customers, to set an appointment so that your question has the attention it deserves.