Although their system had a very weird quirk that was probably the result of trying to streamline operations, HTC's behavior here is pro-consumer.
Having different billing and shipping addresses is a common tactic in credit card fraud, and it's not common in other cases. I prefer companies who prevent people from shipping to unknown addresses unrelated to the payment method (unless authentication is handled some other way).
It's becoming more and more common. And just because it's a common thing to do in credit card fraud does not make a good enough reason to design a system in such a way that it is absolutely and entirely impossible for them to override it. It's also less of an issue for consumers entirely as it's your credit card processor or bank that takes the risk, not you. The risk is much bigger for HTC and that's what they're covering for.
Pro-consumer would be to let the consumer pay for his device to be fixed. Pro-consumer would be to not charge them to fix this in the first place.
In Canada the Canada post system is notorious for being very bad at delivering things. So although my billing information is at my house, me and most the other people in my office have things delivered to our work instead.
I do that for convenience. I'm at work during the day, shipping to my office ensures somebody is there to receive the item. Item doesn't get stolen from the door-step and item doesn't bounce back and forth between warehouse and house waiting for a signature.
What about college students who might be using a credit card with a billing address for their parents' home but live in dorms with different shipping addresses every year?
Sorry, but I think most people don't consider a badly designed service that disenfranchises customers arbitrarily and coincidentally saves HTC a bunch of money to be a "weird quirk."
Plenty of other companies are able to both honor their agreements and prevent fraud, why can't HTC?
Actually, this has been pretty common at nearly every workplace I've worked at (here in Australia).
If you're working full-time, it makes perfect sense.
Your billing address is probably going to be your home address.
But assuming you're working, you wouldn't get packages shipped there - there's nobody at home to sign for them (assuming your spouse/housemate etc. also works), get sent to the local post-office, and you'd have to drive out there during office hours to go pickup your parce. That's a colossal waste of your time.
So often your shipping address is simply your work. I mean, at my current workplace, they've really streamlined it, and they have mail "pods" where you can swipe in, and you have an allocated shelf for each person (well, more a letter range, but yeah, same idea).
My billing address is my post box. Some companies refuse to ship to post boxes (probably due to concerns over fraud) and then my shipping address is of course different to my billing address.
It is pro-consumer to require deeper checks. It is entirely anti-consumer to require them to step through security rings AND require them to pay for it.
This is correct. I once had a series of customer service reps deny me access to my account to the point where they told me my account was irretrievable. Irretrievable? I called back the next day and the new rep told me those other people were totally incorrect, and he resolved my issue in 15 minutes.
With high turnover rate and minimal training, most service reps are reading from a script and attempting to appease you into hanging up the phone anyway.
Some places get "rated" by the length of the calls, not number of happy customers, or resolution to call ratio... just length of calls. Keeping it short, even if it pisses off the customer is better for keeping their job.
I think a lot of people would discount this anecdote as absurd to be true, but I have found this too. I have a friend who did tech support for google and she was quantified on all sorts of naive tracking metrics that were company-focused instead of customer-focused (# of upsells, customers handled per day).
So obviously you can save money by shortening call durations. This has a nice side effect of reducing the number of customers (over time), which also helps reduce support costs.
A better metric might be cost per call. Outsourcing gives them cheaper per-call for the same length. Refusing service probably also shortens the call length. Refusing to do anything outside of the scripted interactions probably leads to some type of punishment for the rep.
could be a variety of factors. might be a small department, which means if you call back, thats another extended call for them, which is bad for the metric. better to get it solved the first time.
Or it could be simply a place that doesn't use the call length metric, I imagine every call center has its own set of rules. I can only speak for the ones that my friends work[ed] for. Overseas call centers may have less focus on call length since the cost of the call to the company is less.
Success from this approach varies depending on the company. Years back, Verizon was trying to charge me their full early termination fee despite being multiple years out of contract – I'd get transferred to a “supervisor” who'd promise to call me back, nothing ever happened. Rinse, lather, repeat.
I dug up an executive office contact and ended up talking to someone who fixed my last bill in about 10 minutes. While doing so, he volunteered that nobody in the first-level call centers had the authority to actually do what I was asking, including the supervisors, but policy prevented them from saying that. I still remember the sense of surprise I got from how open he was about their horrible customer service being the official policy rather than an aberration.
Warranty is expensive to manufacturers and they try and make everything not to fix your stuff.
This is why you should buy from brands that are known for good warranty: I had an awesome experience with Lenovo for my ThinkPad and terrible experience with Dell (they literally refused to fix my laptop, just a year old, because it was second hand and I didn't have the original buying receipt -- though the laptop still had its service tag and more than a year of warranty).
I had the opposite experience. I had a problem with a Dell laptop a few years back and they didn't ask me to ship it back, they sent a tech out with a part to my home! Same week! Nothing beats having the tech fix it and test it and make sure it's working right there.
Lenovo, on the other hand, had 2 week shipping turnarounds and had me waiting for over a month before saying "we can't do anything except put in a new motherboard at your expense", putting me out of a device for 6 total weeks between shipping, waiting and shipping. My local computer repair shop had me fixed in a two day turnaround
I had a similar experience with Lenovo. I was unable to use my device for nearly six months, during which I went through about four returns. They kept sending my laptop back broken! They sent it with a range of issues - initially, they failed to fix the intermittent display flickering, afterwards, it came back with a keyboard containing dead keys, dead LED indicator lights, and missing screws. In the end, I called and told them they were going to pay me for the laptop and we'd part ways.
I will never buy Lenovo again.
I have amazing small/medium business support from Dell on my monitors. If I see a dead pixel, slight backlight fade, or any other issue, I can call Dell and have a new monitor sent overnight to my door.
I bought a Dell monitor from Amazon. It had a defect in the coating, and Dell wouldn't honor the warranty without a dell order number. you can imagine how this turns out. I bought a different brand monitor.
Out of curiosity, was it a Thinkpad, or some other Lenovo? I've had a fantastic experience (though I did shell out the $100 up front for 3 years of NBD On-site support)
I also had a very similar issue. My less than one year old Lenovo Yoga laptop kept refusing to boot up and I sent it back for repairs after failing to demand a replacement or refund, only to get it back with a replaced motherboard and the EXACT same issue. Fast-forward a couple of months of shipping and back-and-forth communication, I had to contact the BBB. I had initially been put in contact with a customer relations representative and they completely stopped taking calls. I never did anything to bother them, except try to make contact with the rep. The BBB forced them to communicate with me again. The call-center was useless because I already had an open ticket, and closing it would be bad because my warranty had just expired. I'll never buy from them since they tried to ignore me completely up until the BBB contacted them on my behalf. I'm almost certain they were hoping I would go away once my warranty expired.
I had a same day repair warranty on my work ThinkPad. The LCD had a known ghosting issue. I called to get the panel swapped, and not only did I get another panel with ghosting, the tech was unable to reassemble the display bezel and left with my system in pieces. I had my company send me a Mac the next mothing. I've had a MacBook Air display replaced at the Apple Store. Took 2 hours, and the machine looked as good as new.
Why do you start by pointing out that your comment and the parent's comment are both merely anecdotes, then conclude by saying you'll never buy Lenovo again?
Because their anecdote is personal to them, and affects their decisions.
They can both be affected thereby and able to point out other people shouldn't take their experience as universal at the same time.
Similarly, I've always had a wonderful experience with thinkpads but I don't believe the people who've had bad experiences should necessarily buy another one.
> Because their anecdote is personal to them, and affects their decisions.
That's just rephrasing my question. I asked why it affects their decision.
You seem to be implying that it is sensible to operate on your own anecdotal experiences as if they carry statistical significance, but that it is not sensible to do the same with other people's anecdotal experiences.
But the reason anecdotal evidence ought not be treated as statistically significant data isn't that the anecdotes may be lies or mistaken memories. The reason is that anecdotal evidence by definition was not gathered systematically and therefore may not represent the entire set of data.
Had a similar experience with a Dell laptop that I literally bought out of a dude's trunk in a parking lot. This was around 2010. They sent out a repair person to replace the motherboard in my Latitude D830 that I paid $250 for second-hand. They had previously replaced the 1920x1200 LCD due to 2 dead pixels. I got seriously lucky with this laptop and it made me a loyal Dell customer for personal laptops.
Edit: maybe it was more like 2008/9. I just remember what job I had then and that it had the expensive extended warranty for 3 or 4 years, and it was about a month and a half from expiring (I looked it up by the service tag).
I had a different experience with Dell - bought a second hand workstation from Dell and 2 weeks before it was 3 years old asked them on chat how to get a new restore DVD - they mailed it express the same day. They just asked for the service tag, then they offered any help I needed.
In both companies consumer support is much different than business support. Dell Inspiron support is shit. Dell Latitude support is great. The same for HP, Lenovo, Asus, etc. The exception is Apple where consumer and business lines of support are the same.
For what it's worth, I've had good results from both consumer and business Dell service; and I can't think of any really negative results. I once had a tech support call that went badly, but I think it was just at the limits of what their server people knew, and not really them not making a good faith effort to support their customer.
It's been a while, though, since I've had any Inspiron or Latitude devices worked on, so it may not be the case today. I did just buy a new Inspiron gaming laptop, however, on the strength of my positive past experience (and excellent price for a 4k lappy with great GPU). It replaced a consumer HP Envy, which is the single worst computer I think I've ever owned. I hope I don't have to test the warranty service on my new Inspiron.
Wait, what about warranty? It's a manufacturing defect and it sounds like they acknowledge that, thus warranty.
I heard that in America there's less warranty by default than in Europe, but isn't 2 years the standard anyway?
In the Netherlands at least, if something breaks unreasonably fast, you can go back even if it has been 10 years. And they can't forward you to the manufacturer or anything: the shop you bought it from has to handle it. Per European law it's 2 years minimum on new electronics (and 1 year second hand) but the Netherlands adds to that.
So, in Australia there's a standard one-year warranty, with an indeterminate exception if you market yourself as a premium brand ("what a reasonable person would expect...").
It was hilarious watching Apple try to convince the government that they weren't a premium brand and therefore didn't have to give longer warranties than a year, while at the same time marketing themselves to the public as a premium brand. The government did the legal equivalent of "cool story, bro" :)
It was hilarious watching Apple try to convince the government that they weren't a premium brand
IMO in the USA they are the only premium brand in terms of service to consumers.
I'm lucky to live where I do, but I have an Apple retail store just 10 minutes from me and another one 30 minutes away. Apple customer service at those stores is second to none.
There are many horror stories of non-Apple consumer laptops breaking, and it taking weeks for them to be repaired. At Apple they fix laptops in the store in a day or two, depending on whether they have replacement parts in stock.
Same with phones. They will either replace a phone on the spot or take less than a day for repairs such as new batteries or new screens.
They even price match. When new computers have just been announced, and older ones are being sold at low prices by third parties, the Apple store will match those prices. I've gotten 28% discounts from them in those situations.
That's all part of the "premium brand" experience, but you do often pay quite a bit more than comparable hardware from other manufacturers.
> There are many horror stories of non-Apple consumer laptops breaking, and it taking weeks for them to be repaired. At Apple they fix laptops in the store in a day or two, depending on whether they have replacement parts in stock.
The only time I ever went to an Apple Store for support on a laptop it did get get fixed within a couple days, but they also replaced my fully-functional hard drive (with all my data) when the only thing broken was the SATA cable. The conversation I had to have with them to convince me to put my original hard drive back in the laptop was pretty mind-numbing, going through stages of "we don't know where the hard drive is" to "we have it, but we can't give it back to you". I did eventually get the original hard drive back, but that experience kind of soured me to the whole "Apple experience", one of the many factors that eventually led me down the road to learning Linux and basic PC repairs, allowing me to order SATA cables and the like from Amazon and replace them in laptops myself.
Wow, what an incredibly vague law...
I suppose there's no problem as long as everyone agrees to be everyone else's definition of reasonable.
This seems to be an undue burden of uncertainty. I make sprockets and offer 14 months, but my customer sues for 15 and wins a class action settlement. I should have been able to know whether my actions were legal or not, but I'm not sure I realistically could.
When customer service says "can't" or "impossible" what they mean is "won't" or "don't know how".
Hang up the phone and try your call again. If that doesn't work call the sales number and pretend you're evaluating the unit for possible use with a school full of kids.
There's alot of mixed opinions about HTC customer support on the vive subreddit currently, with people trying to get various HTC vive faults resolved. The secret seems to be that you keep contacting until you get a competent support rep.
I've seen a few people suggest the US support is worse than the EU support, but I've not personally had to deal with HTC support so can't really give any personal anecdotes.
This reminded me of my experience with HTC Desire S about 5 years ago. Bought it from Amazon, used for about 3 months with the utmost care possible only for the phone to get bricked when trying to install an over the air update.
HTC customer support asked me to post it to them. I did as I was told and after a few days they respond with a quote of about £120! According to their report, the LCD unit and the microdrive had to be replaced due to user abuse. I was totally disappointed that instead of admitting that it was a faulty device they tried to charge me for no fault of mine.
I paid £20 for return of the device without repairing and reached out to Amazon who refunded me fully without asking a single question. Notice any difference in customer service by these two companies?
I've noticed phone companies just don't care. Had a Nexus 5 with a faulty internal power button. One day it wouldn't turn on anymore. Was quoted $150 or so for a fix, despite it being a result of shitty parts and not abuse. I just binned it and moved on.
My Nexus 5 fell victim to the underwater camcorder defect roughly a year back. I had to start flashing a community made patch from XDA to keep it going (which also keeps me from using the stock firmware ever again). There were multiple bugs listed on Google's tracker citing the issue, but Google either remained silent, tried to shift the blame to a Qualcomm driver that they supposedly had no control over, or just silently close the thread with a self serving "won't fix" tag. CM 13 incorporates the patch automatically now, so it's gotten better. But still, the hardware on the Android side of things has gotten so bad in recent years.
All of this makes me want an iPhone as my next device solely for the hardware support.
As a newcomer to the UK, I've learned I should try to purchase everything with a credit card the hard way. Then you can always use Section 75 of Consumer Credits Act to get reimbursed by your bank in cases where companies refuse to accept their liability. Somehow, customer support seems to be going downhill. Sad days.
I've been debating spending the $ buying the HTC Vive a lot these past few weeks and this is scarying me :/ There were some horror stories on r/vive as well (about them not wanting to fix dead pixels because of the law about <5 dead pixels for TV screens).
Unless the vendor is known for exceptional customer service then don't waste your money on extended warranties and make sure you have reserve funds to replace such purchases. Yes - cynicism will not prevent or solve these problems - but it will eliminate the anger and disappointment.
The one HTC phone I ever bought was the HTC Freestyle - biggest piece of garbage I've ever spent any money on. The apps would crash constantly, and texts would either send 4 times or never send at all. All of these were bugs that were known and documented, but never fixed in the several updates my phone received. I'd love to know the story behind that phone...
I fix phones for a living and frequently assist customers with calling manufacturers for warranty issues.
LG and HTC are the worst, with the most frequent denial of customer assistance. Samsung and Apple have their faults, but you can typically reach someone helpful when there is an issue.
HTC has some of the worst design decisions I've ever seen. The M8 and M9 each contain approximately 20 pieces of tape on the inside, holding important components together. It takes about 4 hours to replace a screen or charging port, and usually doesn't go back together well.
LG is pretty terrible, as well. Read the horror stories about the G4. The G5 is already exhibiting some of the same flaws, such as half the screen freezing or just showing static, or the device not powering on fully straight out of the box.
Nothing is perfect, and every device has its own faults, but I strongly caution people about dealing with companies like this.
I have one and only had problems with a bad screen protector (that covered the sensor). Despite that, I was going to the G5, just thinking because off the smaller screen.
FWIW, I have owned a G5 since it came out (first LG phone I've owned since flip-phones!) and it's been working very well for me. Only thing I dislike is the GPS sometimes being slow to resolve.
I probably will buy HTC again as long as they honor the commitment they made. My HTC One A9 had all the specs I needed at the time -- removable storage, fingerprint sensor, NFC, 3GB RAM. But what I really like about it is that HTC promised updates within 15 days of Nexus phones receiving their security updates. So far they've lived up to it in spirit, if not in letter. i.e, updates aren't always within 15 days but I'm on the June 1 security patch, the same as the Nexus devices.
EDIT: Forgot to mention the "Uh-oh" protection. They replaced my device (many questions asked, but not super painful) when it fell down and I broke the glass.
I just went through this exact same frustrating process when trying to buy a phone and activate a new line of service with T-Mobile. After three days of back and forth on Twitter (yes, it's the best way to actually talk to them) and phone, I was finally told what I was trying to do simply could not be done because the order could not be "verified" by their system. I've had the same T-Mobile account for over a decade, and I spend nearly $200/month on mobile service with them...but, I can't be "verified".
I think it was the billing/shipping mismatch (I travel full-time, so my billing address is a forwarding service in a city I'm unlikely to see again for years, while my shipping address is wherever I'm parked this month). But, their system wouldn't allow changes once the verification had failed. No level of "escalation" could resolve the issue. It was simply a "sorry, no". I guess I am now in a permanent state of "unverified" with T-Mobile, and if I want to buy another phone or activate another line it'll have to be with another provider. I had similar problems with Sprint, which is why I ended up trying to add another line to T-Mobile (I have both, for a variety of reasons, and Sprint would have been a better deal, but their customer support is even worse, if that's imaginable).
It's scary how systems like this can make it impossible to provide a basic level of customer service to someone who doesn't fit the systems exactly. There was a time when customer service reps, or at least their managers, had the ability to override the system when the system prevented a reasonable level of customer service. That doesn't seem to happen anymore, at least in my limited recent experiences dealing with customer service reps at big companies.
Is nobody reading the actual story of the article? The interesting take away here is design of IT systems, not anecdotes of phone quality.
It's very easy to hack together a web form that always work when taking the happy path. When reality hits you you will notice that you always need some kind of manual override, the dilemma is that this will break automation further down the stream. In one place I worked where we made similar systems we made all forms free text instead of constrained to dates, numbers, addresses etc. The UI would initially constrain the input but you could always enter advanced mode which just made everything into text and marked the whole form as non-machine-processable. It wasn't pretty but in the end it was the only thing that worked in practice. Similarily, editing forms once they are submitted is also commonly overlooked, I've been in contact with many organizations where deleting the order and creating a new is easier then modifying the existing one, as the experience in the article also shows.
Horrible way to treat a customer. What OP experienced was a very strict fraud prevention system. I'm not trying to excuse HTC in any way, they should have a way for a manager to override. Nevertheless, I thought I'd share my experience with a different company with similar anti-fraud policies. Should anyone find themselves in a similar situation, call your bank and ask about adding an additional address to your account. This way the address verification check with the processing gateway will succeed when your shipping address is submitted.
That's too bad. I didnt realize their CS was poor. I've had a M8 One for just over a year now and its my favorite phone since the iphone 4s. I dont know if I'd be able to switch back to an iphone.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 30.4 ms ] threadHaving different billing and shipping addresses is a common tactic in credit card fraud, and it's not common in other cases. I prefer companies who prevent people from shipping to unknown addresses unrelated to the payment method (unless authentication is handled some other way).
Pro-consumer would be to let the consumer pay for his device to be fixed. Pro-consumer would be to not charge them to fix this in the first place.
Plenty of other companies are able to both honor their agreements and prevent fraud, why can't HTC?
If you're working full-time, it makes perfect sense.
Your billing address is probably going to be your home address.
But assuming you're working, you wouldn't get packages shipped there - there's nobody at home to sign for them (assuming your spouse/housemate etc. also works), get sent to the local post-office, and you'd have to drive out there during office hours to go pickup your parce. That's a colossal waste of your time.
So often your shipping address is simply your work. I mean, at my current workplace, they've really streamlined it, and they have mail "pods" where you can swipe in, and you have an allocated shelf for each person (well, more a letter range, but yeah, same idea).
I frankly abhor that you even said so as its this sort of ill thought complacency that allows organizations to continue this behavior.
What they should do is eat the cost of fraud or invent better fraud detection.
With high turnover rate and minimal training, most service reps are reading from a script and attempting to appease you into hanging up the phone anyway.
So obviously you can save money by shortening call durations. This has a nice side effect of reducing the number of customers (over time), which also helps reduce support costs.
#metricsDrivenManagement
Or it could be simply a place that doesn't use the call length metric, I imagine every call center has its own set of rules. I can only speak for the ones that my friends work[ed] for. Overseas call centers may have less focus on call length since the cost of the call to the company is less.
I dug up an executive office contact and ended up talking to someone who fixed my last bill in about 10 minutes. While doing so, he volunteered that nobody in the first-level call centers had the authority to actually do what I was asking, including the supervisors, but policy prevented them from saying that. I still remember the sense of surprise I got from how open he was about their horrible customer service being the official policy rather than an aberration.
This is why you should buy from brands that are known for good warranty: I had an awesome experience with Lenovo for my ThinkPad and terrible experience with Dell (they literally refused to fix my laptop, just a year old, because it was second hand and I didn't have the original buying receipt -- though the laptop still had its service tag and more than a year of warranty).
Next time, buy a Lenovo tablet.
This is why you shouldn't trust anecdotes.
I had the opposite experience. I had a problem with a Dell laptop a few years back and they didn't ask me to ship it back, they sent a tech out with a part to my home! Same week! Nothing beats having the tech fix it and test it and make sure it's working right there.
Lenovo, on the other hand, had 2 week shipping turnarounds and had me waiting for over a month before saying "we can't do anything except put in a new motherboard at your expense", putting me out of a device for 6 total weeks between shipping, waiting and shipping. My local computer repair shop had me fixed in a two day turnaround
I'll never buy Lenovo again, absolutely never.
I will never buy Lenovo again.
I have amazing small/medium business support from Dell on my monitors. If I see a dead pixel, slight backlight fade, or any other issue, I can call Dell and have a new monitor sent overnight to my door.
They can both be affected thereby and able to point out other people shouldn't take their experience as universal at the same time.
Similarly, I've always had a wonderful experience with thinkpads but I don't believe the people who've had bad experiences should necessarily buy another one.
That's just rephrasing my question. I asked why it affects their decision.
You seem to be implying that it is sensible to operate on your own anecdotal experiences as if they carry statistical significance, but that it is not sensible to do the same with other people's anecdotal experiences.
But the reason anecdotal evidence ought not be treated as statistically significant data isn't that the anecdotes may be lies or mistaken memories. The reason is that anecdotal evidence by definition was not gathered systematically and therefore may not represent the entire set of data.
Edit: maybe it was more like 2008/9. I just remember what job I had then and that it had the expensive extended warranty for 3 or 4 years, and it was about a month and a half from expiring (I looked it up by the service tag).
It's been a while, though, since I've had any Inspiron or Latitude devices worked on, so it may not be the case today. I did just buy a new Inspiron gaming laptop, however, on the strength of my positive past experience (and excellent price for a 4k lappy with great GPU). It replaced a consumer HP Envy, which is the single worst computer I think I've ever owned. I hope I don't have to test the warranty service on my new Inspiron.
After they got caught bundling malware twice, I'm never buying Lenovo again.
I would be cautious with that too.
1. http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/19/technology/security/lenovo-s... 2. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/now-three-pre-installed-malware...
I heard that in America there's less warranty by default than in Europe, but isn't 2 years the standard anyway?
In the Netherlands at least, if something breaks unreasonably fast, you can go back even if it has been 10 years. And they can't forward you to the manufacturer or anything: the shop you bought it from has to handle it. Per European law it's 2 years minimum on new electronics (and 1 year second hand) but the Netherlands adds to that.
It was hilarious watching Apple try to convince the government that they weren't a premium brand and therefore didn't have to give longer warranties than a year, while at the same time marketing themselves to the public as a premium brand. The government did the legal equivalent of "cool story, bro" :)
IMO in the USA they are the only premium brand in terms of service to consumers.
I'm lucky to live where I do, but I have an Apple retail store just 10 minutes from me and another one 30 minutes away. Apple customer service at those stores is second to none.
There are many horror stories of non-Apple consumer laptops breaking, and it taking weeks for them to be repaired. At Apple they fix laptops in the store in a day or two, depending on whether they have replacement parts in stock.
Same with phones. They will either replace a phone on the spot or take less than a day for repairs such as new batteries or new screens.
They even price match. When new computers have just been announced, and older ones are being sold at low prices by third parties, the Apple store will match those prices. I've gotten 28% discounts from them in those situations.
That's all part of the "premium brand" experience, but you do often pay quite a bit more than comparable hardware from other manufacturers.
The only time I ever went to an Apple Store for support on a laptop it did get get fixed within a couple days, but they also replaced my fully-functional hard drive (with all my data) when the only thing broken was the SATA cable. The conversation I had to have with them to convince me to put my original hard drive back in the laptop was pretty mind-numbing, going through stages of "we don't know where the hard drive is" to "we have it, but we can't give it back to you". I did eventually get the original hard drive back, but that experience kind of soured me to the whole "Apple experience", one of the many factors that eventually led me down the road to learning Linux and basic PC repairs, allowing me to order SATA cables and the like from Amazon and replace them in laptops myself.
This seems to be an undue burden of uncertainty. I make sprockets and offer 14 months, but my customer sues for 15 and wins a class action settlement. I should have been able to know whether my actions were legal or not, but I'm not sure I realistically could.
Hang up the phone and try your call again. If that doesn't work call the sales number and pretend you're evaluating the unit for possible use with a school full of kids.
I've seen a few people suggest the US support is worse than the EU support, but I've not personally had to deal with HTC support so can't really give any personal anecdotes.
HTC customer support asked me to post it to them. I did as I was told and after a few days they respond with a quote of about £120! According to their report, the LCD unit and the microdrive had to be replaced due to user abuse. I was totally disappointed that instead of admitting that it was a faulty device they tried to charge me for no fault of mine.
I paid £20 for return of the device without repairing and reached out to Amazon who refunded me fully without asking a single question. Notice any difference in customer service by these two companies?
All of this makes me want an iPhone as my next device solely for the hardware support.
As a newcomer to the UK, I've learned I should try to purchase everything with a credit card the hard way. Then you can always use Section 75 of Consumer Credits Act to get reimbursed by your bank in cases where companies refuse to accept their liability. Somehow, customer support seems to be going downhill. Sad days.
That was the last good phone they will ever build though, so I'm not going back for more.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12155451 and marked it off-topic.
LG and HTC are the worst, with the most frequent denial of customer assistance. Samsung and Apple have their faults, but you can typically reach someone helpful when there is an issue.
HTC has some of the worst design decisions I've ever seen. The M8 and M9 each contain approximately 20 pieces of tape on the inside, holding important components together. It takes about 4 hours to replace a screen or charging port, and usually doesn't go back together well.
LG is pretty terrible, as well. Read the horror stories about the G4. The G5 is already exhibiting some of the same flaws, such as half the screen freezing or just showing static, or the device not powering on fully straight out of the box.
Nothing is perfect, and every device has its own faults, but I strongly caution people about dealing with companies like this.
I have one and only had problems with a bad screen protector (that covered the sensor). Despite that, I was going to the G5, just thinking because off the smaller screen.
EDIT: Forgot to mention the "Uh-oh" protection. They replaced my device (many questions asked, but not super painful) when it fell down and I broke the glass.
I think it was the billing/shipping mismatch (I travel full-time, so my billing address is a forwarding service in a city I'm unlikely to see again for years, while my shipping address is wherever I'm parked this month). But, their system wouldn't allow changes once the verification had failed. No level of "escalation" could resolve the issue. It was simply a "sorry, no". I guess I am now in a permanent state of "unverified" with T-Mobile, and if I want to buy another phone or activate another line it'll have to be with another provider. I had similar problems with Sprint, which is why I ended up trying to add another line to T-Mobile (I have both, for a variety of reasons, and Sprint would have been a better deal, but their customer support is even worse, if that's imaginable).
It's scary how systems like this can make it impossible to provide a basic level of customer service to someone who doesn't fit the systems exactly. There was a time when customer service reps, or at least their managers, had the ability to override the system when the system prevented a reasonable level of customer service. That doesn't seem to happen anymore, at least in my limited recent experiences dealing with customer service reps at big companies.
It's very easy to hack together a web form that always work when taking the happy path. When reality hits you you will notice that you always need some kind of manual override, the dilemma is that this will break automation further down the stream. In one place I worked where we made similar systems we made all forms free text instead of constrained to dates, numbers, addresses etc. The UI would initially constrain the input but you could always enter advanced mode which just made everything into text and marked the whole form as non-machine-processable. It wasn't pretty but in the end it was the only thing that worked in practice. Similarily, editing forms once they are submitted is also commonly overlooked, I've been in contact with many organizations where deleting the order and creating a new is easier then modifying the existing one, as the experience in the article also shows.