OK,I do not usually go to this length of explanation, but since this customer has been a bit bombastic, I thought a detailed and accurate account of this customer's interaction with us should be put out into public view. It is the weekend but I was able to dig into this case and can provide some insight - at least based on the ticket notes. From what I can tell everything aligned to our policies and you can read this and then decide for yourselves if this vitriolic post was warranted or not.
First of all, it should be known that our "official" hours of support are M-F 9-5PM PT. We are not Dell, LG, Sony, or some multi-million-dollar-funded startup company. That said, many of us still try and jump in, off the clock, and help out fellow reefkeepers like myself. In fact, that is exactly what happened here.
Last Friday, at just after 5PM, we received a case from this customer, J. M. Our Eastern US Sales manager, Tom, helped him out by holding his hand and getting him all set up on Apex Fusion. Tom then noted in the ticket history that this customer's temp probe was reading 20.
As many of you Apex users out there know, the temp probes themselves rarely fail and getting a 20 out of the box usually means the customer has not plugged in the temp probe or has it plugged into the wrong port (many times they put them in the network or vspd ports). With this in mind, our support manager sent an email to J.M. at 9:28PM (over four hours after we'd closed) giving him some troubleshooting help. The email is below.
A little more than an hour later J.M. responded that "Tried the plug and reboot still 20".
The next day, Saturday, on his day off, Jon then emailed the customer offering to set up a scheduled phone support session with him that coming week. He gave him instructions for setting up the screen sharing software and said that we would be contacting him with a time/date slot.
J.M. did not respond to that email.
On Wednesday it appears he called Tom via his private phone number and told Tom that his salinity probe was also now not working.
J.M. then emailed and said that he would call in on Thursday (3/24) at 2PM. We responded that we already had an appointment at that time but we would try and slot him in between two appointments at 2:30PM.
After an issue with the customer giving the wrong phone number, we finally were able to take a look at the customer's Apex and felt that it was likely a faulty temp probe (or some sort of customer error) and the salinity probe was not giving consistent readings so we began the RMA process.
Our RMA process requires that we get proof of purchase. We requested the information for the RMA and the customer responded "This is a very tedious process. I spent a lot of $ on this system. 40% of the probes came not working. I would think your company would just send these probes and get the ball rolling. This is ridiculous. Call me to get the serial #s. I've had just about enough of your terrible service. "
When a product is this new, we include a return shipping label with the RMA information we send so it does not cost the customer for shipping. Also, we will offer to send the replacement parts out with a CC deposit. When the returned parts arrive, assuming no customer abuse damage and they are indeed found to be faulty, a credit is put back on their card.
Yesterday (Saturday) he sent us the proof of purchase info. Even though it was not a work day for our support team, we sent him his RMA and return shipping label. J.M. was not happy - he responded "Are u mailing me my replacement probes in the mean time??"
We then responded with our policy (stated above) and J.M. last response was: "I want a phone call from someone in management. The customer service I am receiving is unacceptable. Call me at (xxx) yyy-zzzz. I have jumped through endless hoops to get this unit fixed. I spent nearly one thousand dollars on this unit and it has two bad probes. And I feel like your company is dragging their feet in getting it up and running. I spent like 30 minutes on the phone with a "technician " to determine the probes are bad. Now you're basically telling me that was a waste of time. I'm going on every forum I belong to and letting people know how your company treats its customers. -- Actually, the technician was establishing that the Apex was likely not the culprit by doing some low-level diagnostics.
We did not drag our feet. We responded to his original request last weekend. We could have had everything figured out on Tuesday of last week. J.M. did not get back to us until Wednesday and could not talk to us until Thursday. The customer did not provide proof of purchase until yesterday. Nothing could have been done any faster on our end. The customer though could have cut three days out of the process by responding and getting a support session on Tuesday.
The fact that we have west coast support hours actually helps the east coast customers. Our techs are available until 8PM ET. Furthermore, our team - including myself - go far beyond our business hours to help customers.
I am not going to use this thread to hash out whether or not this customer thinks our policies are adequate or just - only to let everyone know what the actually course of events were in this case. I am sorry that J.M. may have received faulty equipment - I hope we are able to get him up and running as fast as possible.
