I was on the phone trying to get in touch with the Customer Service group of Other World Computing about an order. As is too common nowadays, they use an automated phone menu system, but this one forces you to talk to it which I particularly don’t like. I had to grab my voice recorder to capture this after my first attempt:
Customer Service phone call attempt (MP3)
Ironically, in a different part of the menu it did have the option to “customer service.” Unfortunately, I had stopped recording and wasn’t going to go back into menu hell to capture it.
- Al Degutis
Yesterday Drobo released a new model of their “robotic storage” which provides Firewire 800 connectivity, in addition to the USB ports of the original model.
I purchased the USB-based Drobo 12 days prior to the announcement of the new version. Had the Firewire version been available, I would have purchased it. I went to the Drobostore.com site and could not find a written policy for exchanges or returns. In fact, even the privacy policy comes up “not found.” So, they don’t have a return policy? I called customer service. The woman on the phone confirmed that they do not have any policies in place, took my information and said she would have to talk to someone and they’d get back to me. I followed up with an e-mail via their support form to make sure my request didn’t get lost. A little more digging around their website turned up a warranty policy that only covered non-functioning hardware.
I found out this morning, via email, that they will not exchange it.
Most retailers have either a 14-day or 30-day return/exchange policy. I find this to be poor customer service. Especially since they don’t have a written return policy online. What if Best Buy, Dell, Apple and others didn’t have a return policy? Not acceptable.
-Al Degutis
My son bought a Samsung TV a couple years ago and did not buy the service plan. This year his TV stopped working and he took it in for repair. Two months later the repair shop calls to say that they will not be receiving the part from Samsung but Samsung agreed to replace the TV with a brand new 2008 model for only $400. Great! Awesome! The TV comes back from the repair shop and he has to contact them to arrange for payment and delivery. He has to pay with a credit card in his name, which he does not have. So he looks into getting a pre-paid card but then that wouldn’t have his name on it. So one more month later we call them together and they finally agree to let me write a check and send that to them. The check was written on 6/3 and mailed the same day. Since then he has called them a couple of times a week to arrange for the shipment and exchange of his TV. Each time they tell him the check has not cleared yet. So I check with my bank and they have not even deposited it yet! Supposedly they were going to deposit it this week but as of the night of 6/27 they still have not deposited the check. Why does it take a month to deposit a check? From the initial conversation with Samsung they said once the check clears it would take 14-21 days. Guess we should have asked how long will it take you to deposit the check so it CAN clear!!!!!!!!!!! I went from thinking that they had great customer service based on the $400 exchange price to thinking it’s TERRIBLE customer service for stringing him along for so damn long. Hope I NEVER have to deal with them again.
