Apple Store employees of Reddit: Do you consider yourself a part of Apple or a second class retail worker?

I'll chime in on this conversation with a different perspective.

I worked for AppleCare phone support for several years. I was trained for many products, OSX, iMac/Power Mac hardware, iPod, and was part of the team when the first iPhone was released, which was fun, because we had "secret training" where they didn't tell us what we were supporting until the day it was released, but we got a bunch of cell network training so we basically knew the iPhone was a real thing when it was still just a rumour online. They even had a code name during our training, I can't remember exactly what it was but it was something like "project M18 training".

Around the same time iPhone was released I was moved from taking actual calls to doing quality control. Basically monitoring calls and providing feedback to the people one the phones on areas they could improve etc. Very thankless, CSR's hated QA because QA seems like a bunch of know-it-alls, which we kinda are, but it's just because we've been trained on a lot of different product lines and actually know our shit, have a decent personality, don't get frustrated, are good at calming people down, good at selling extended warrant...err AppleCare Protection Plans, etc.

I worked at a 3rd party call centre (ie. a call centre that was contracted by Apple to provide support, I wasn't an Apple employee. The same call centre did support for other companies as well).

I will say that Apple was the most hands-on client that call centre had. They did make us feel like part of a team. QA people were given AIM addresses for actual Apple employees so we could ask questions, clarify policies, etc. That's super rare, having a direct line to the client (Apple) when you work at a 3rd party call centre is pretty much unheard of. They used to encourage us to get in touch as often as we needed, and were always really friendly.

As for the aforementioned iPhone launch, a couple of days before it came out they actually sent an Apple rep from Cupertino to our call centre to demo the phone for us and left a few loaners that we could check out and take home to play with overnight to familiarize ourselves with them. This was in Canada BTW, iPhones at launch were AT&T only, and Canada doesn't have AT&T, so people who worked on the Apple contract were the first people in Canada to get to play with/show off iPhones. Friends literally came over to my house just to touch the iPhone that I checked out because it was so new and cool and unobtainable LOL.

Anyway, long story, but what I'm saying is that no, it wasn't perfect, it was still a call centre job BUT Apple definitely did everything they could to make us feel like part of their team (which trickled down to the customers). I imagine the stores are the same. You're just an employee, the job is annoying, and know that you can be replaced at the drop of a hat but it is nice to know that Apple cares enough about their customers to treat the people who are directly communicating with their customers well. That's what it is: they wanted us to be happy so we could make their customers happy, we were the face/voice of Apple in the customers eyes.

/r/apple Thread