Patch Lady – when support goes too far

First off I know many of you will go …uh huh what do you expect of a company that maps your house.. but I love my irobots… until they don’t work.  I purchased an iRobot i7 with a clean base that … for a while would vacuum the house and go back to the base and empty itself.  And Susan was happy.  Until it didn’t empty itself.  It would go back to the base and charge but would not sense that the clean base was there.  So I went on the web and did all the support documents said to do to get it to work again.  And still it wouldn’t see the clean base.

So finally when busy season was over and I had a chance to call them, I did.  And during the call explained all the steps I had previously gone through to get it working.  (rebooted the machine, rebooted the clean base, moved the iRobot to 8 feet away from the clean base and pressed the button to go home, cleaned all sensors, cleaned all clean base sensors, etc, etc, even removed the battery to reset the unit, trust me folks I’m a geek, I read your support docs and nothing is working).  So then the support personnel wanted to do a video chat with me.  I’m on a phone I’m thinking…. I’ve explained what I did… why do I need to do a video call?  So he texts me a link to their support video platform.  Which I can tell from clicking on it that their video chat tool is having technical issues and is not making a connection.  He has me try a second time and it doesn’t work.  So then he informs me that I need to record a video and upload it to icloud in order to share it with him to demonstrate what is not working and what steps I’ve done to get it to work.

Excuse me?  Gentlemen at what point in time do you take the word of your customer and do the right thing?

I asked to speak to a supervisor to express my opinion that asking me to do a video call was beyond acceptable as a practice to ask of your customers especially after your support tool clearly was not functional.  They agreed and promised to send out a replacement robot, clean base and evacuation bin.  So today the package arrives from iRobot telling me to reset my robot, take out the battery and put it in the replacement one and then send back the defective three parts.  So I remove the five screws, take the battery out, and open up the replacement box getting ready to place the battery in the replacement robot.  And that’s where the fun started.

You see, only the clean base arrived, not a robot. Seriously of the three promised replacement parts, only one was shipped, the base vacuum robot in particular was not shipped.   So off I call again to ask then to follow up.  And they indicate they will have to look into it with UPS as it must be a shipping problem.  They assure me that three items were shipped.  I assure them that no, just one arrived.

I am sure that if I looked into the customer support notes of my case they would probably call me slightly beligerent.  Right now I feel frustrated and feel that customer support shouldn’t believe the UPS shipping that says that “oh yes three items were delivered” and instead believe the word of a customer who loves your devices and is losing faith with them as a result of your customer support.

Why do technology items have to constantly have such frustrating customer support experiences?  Why is this “acceptable” in this industry?

Thank you, Woody for letting me vent on your platform.  At least it made me feel a bit better to get out my customer support frustrations.