Differences between the Retail Store and the Customer Service.

As you may know, Apple is a company with stores ubicated worldwide. But there's also a telephone number and a chat option in the website (where I work). Did you ever think about the differences about the two services and where they're located?

Apple is actually in Ireland (an unknown fact for a lot of people), where one of the customer service centers is located, in Gork. But there are two more offices in Barcelona and Berlin.
The service and goals are the same everywhere: Give the customer the best experience and sell as many products as possible. But Apple doesn't treat the store workers equal to the office workers, although people from the store sometimes reach people from the office to solve some doubts.

I've never worked in a store, I just work at the Chat Service, but the first thing they told me when I began to work here is that we cannot tell that we work at Apple and that we just get a 7% discount on products compared to the 40% the retail store workers get.

That made me wonder why the Cust Service gets such a different treatment compared to the Retail Store. Because it's not only the discount, they also get paid more (about 500 €). Both of the services get a specific training to know all about Apple to be able to sell and advise the customers, but the one's behind a phone or a screen are treated like less, when we do exactly the same job.

Apple would probably treat them as equal if people like me and my colleagues worked directly for them, but since our employer is Sellbytel, everything works different.

Training & About the Blog.

I've been wanting to write about something for a long time to start a blog, but I couldn't find that 'thing' that would motivate me. But then I got a job offer a few weeks back and since I always loved to write a journal, I would do it in form of a blog but a little different:

I want to talk about where I work and what I do there.

Why?

Because I just started the training for this new job not so long ago, but on one of those first days our trainer got very angry with one of my colleagues. For what reason? Because she posted in Facebook where she was working now. 

This is something that bothers me a lot, this secrecy that enterprises like this one carry around so their customers won't find out how the work is done or what they do to have such a perfect image to the outside. Things like that this company I just began working for controls all of our social media accounts and the computers we use to make sure we don't tell anyone that they have an outsourced company doing their well-known Customer Service job.

I'm talking about so-perfect-Apple.

So the blog will be about what I do there, how the Cust Service works, the compensations we get, etcetera.

Thanks for reading :)