Apple and Amazon aren't event remotely in the same league. Amazon chat agents use canned responses (probably due to being required to handle multiple customers at one time.) I've had one tech support/customer service interaction by phone with Apple and it was great - I needed my out of warranty MBP battery replaced. The agent was kind, knowledgeable, focused and took her time working with me to diagnose/confirm the issue and setup the return (they sent me a box & label to send the MBP in for service.) I had my MBP back within 5 business days from the day they picked it up. Apple is expensive, but they take phone support seriously.
Apple support seems to come and go in waves depending on when the last time someone looked at the expenses were. In my time working there, we'd have months where everything was by the book and the book was the Apple Care service contract written up by the lawyers, or where every customer got the hard sell on all the metrics (they didn't have many but those they had we needed to push).
We also had months where one could get assigned to spending 3 whole days helping a customer port all of their emails and photos out of a corrupted windows outlook installation over to their new mac for no other reason than they'd asked for help getting it done.
Or where you would be celebrated for spending 5 hours with a 65 year old grandmother buying her first computer carefully going over all her needs and specs and down selling her from what the competitors had convinced her she needed (seriously, no 65 year old grandmother getting her first computer needs the hardware or associated software to cut together professional film in order digitize her collection of VHS home movies) and finish up with a sale of maybe $1300 and directions to competitor down the street because they have better photo printers than the few we carry in stock all on the (IMO correct) theory that a customer who can trust you to exactly what they need and nothing more and send them to a competitor for a better product is one who will come back again and again on the basis of that trust.
I don't know how expensive those two interactions were in the short term, but I do at least know that 65 year old grandmother became a regular customer and could not stop telling all the other customers how much she loved us. For as many problems as I did have with how Apple hamstrung their people, I do wish more companies were even half as good as that.
My ipod 3rd gen broke in 2005. Mailed support, I had a new one mailed few days later. They didn't even bother checking whether it was broke, or even retired it, they just sent me a new one.
I don't like Apple too much and try to avoid their products, but can't lie never had such a good customer experience.
Probably depends what you need. I’ve used Amazon quite a lot for quite a long time and I’ve never had an issue go unresolved. I guess I’ve also almost never had to talk to a human though, they have pretty well automated just doing whatever the customer wants them to in most cases.
The last time I had to talk to a human (and it was two years ago) was because I accidentally left a fire stick behind in Puerto Rico two years prior and someone bought a few seasons of True Blood with my Amazon credentials. They still refunded me, even though it took me two years to notice the charge.
