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Apple Retail's alliance with OnForce: A bad deal for consultants, consumers?
Apple Retail is changing the way that non-warranty support calls currently handled by certified Apple consultants are assigned, and that's making some members of the Apple Consultants Network (ACN) unhappy. In the past, a consultant who had gone through Apple's rigorous certification process and paid the annual ACN program fees could be interviewed by local Apple Store managers to be added to a referral list. If an Apple customer had an issue that could not be handled in-store by the Genius Bar, the store would provide him or her with a random selection of business cards from local ACN members who were on the list, and the customer could set up an appointment with the ACN. While this program worked well for many years, it apparently rubbed Apple Retail (the current organization behind the ACN program and the Apple Stores) the wrong way. They had no control over the rates charged by ACN members and also had no way -- other than by word of mouth -- to verify the quality of the work that was being performed by ACNs. That all began to change in 2009 when Apple began testing a new support structure that used an existing organization, OnForce, to distribute support calls to ACN members who wanted to sign up as part of the program.
