8 ms·

Why I’m never buying HTC again

150 points by whack 10y ago

smt88 10y ago
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).
- daenney 10y ago
  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.
- sxg 10y ago
  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?
- chrisfosterelli 10y ago
  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.
  - alistairSH 10y ago
    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.
- Dr_tldr 10y ago
  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?
- victorhooi 10y ago
  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).
- rubyn00bie 10y ago
  No it asbolutely is not pro-consumer. It's reducing their liability not in anyway helping consumers prevent fraud. 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.
- Frqy3 10y ago
  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.
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  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.
gk1 10y ago
If you're talking with an unreasonable rep who won't transfer you to a supervisor, hang up and try calling again, hoping for a more reasonable rep.
- krirken 10y ago
  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.
  - bisby 10y ago
    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.
    - alexandercrohde 10y ago
      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).
      - rspeer 10y ago
        Google has tech support?!
        lcpriest 10y ago
        If you are a paying customer :)
znpy 10y ago
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). Next time, buy a Lenovo tablet.
- criley2 10y ago
  >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.
  - GeorgeHahn 10y ago
    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.
    - op00to 10y ago
      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.
lucb1e 10y ago
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.
- vacri 10y ago
  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" :)
  - JonRB 10y ago
    Do you know where I could read about this? I can't find anythign about it at all.
    - kristianp 10y ago
      http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/apple-keeps-warranty-switch-under-wraps-20130318-2gahc.html http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/apple-k...
  - PhantomGremlin 10y ago
    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.
noonespecial 10y ago
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.
arekkas 10y ago
The day they made batteries unreplaceable was the day I decided to never buy HTC ever again
- na85 10y ago
  I hope you don't buy Apple.
Robadob 10y ago
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.
adarshr 10y ago
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?
- 67726e 10y ago
  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.
  - dabockster 10y ago
    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.
- nextos 10y ago
  Good you had bought from Amazon. 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.
nikanj 10y ago
That's what you get for living in a socialist hellhole. In freedomland, you get to sue the company.
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't do this here. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12155451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12155451 and marked it off-topic.
baby 10y ago
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).
ankushnarula 10y ago
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.
misingnoglic 10y ago
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...
murjinsee 10y ago
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.
- woliveirajr 10y ago
  Could you tell more about the LG G4? 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.
  - jjaredsimpson 10y ago
    I have a G4 and I can feel myself getting emotional and doubting grandparent. I both want to and don't want to know.
  - jonathanyc 10y ago
    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.
- Retr0spectrum 10y ago
  I agree that the M8 and M9 are rather tedious to repair, but 4 hours is a bit of an exaggeration. More like 1 hour.
jor-el 10y ago
Is it common for a customer assistance to ask for your Credit Card number over the phone? Or they are having a secure telephone payment system?
putlake 10y ago
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.
SwellJoe 10y ago
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.
Too 10y ago
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.
- chiefalchemist 10y ago
  My takeaway was the same team designed the device and the support system. I know, doubtful. However, the do obviously share the same culture.
CodeWriter23 10y ago
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.
Taylor_OD 10y ago
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.

150 points by whack 10y ago

smt88 10y ago

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).

daenney 10y ago
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.
sxg 10y ago
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?
chrisfosterelli 10y ago
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.
- alistairSH 10y ago
  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.
Dr_tldr 10y ago
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?
victorhooi 10y ago
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).
rubyn00bie 10y ago
No it asbolutely is not pro-consumer. It's reducing their liability not in anyway helping consumers prevent fraud. 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.
Frqy3 10y ago
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.
Mithaldu 10y ago
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.

gk1 10y ago

If you're talking with an unreasonable rep who won't transfer you to a supervisor, hang up and try calling again, hoping for a more reasonable rep.

krirken 10y ago
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.
- bisby 10y ago
  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.
  - alexandercrohde 10y ago
    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).
    - rspeer 10y ago
      Google has tech support?!
      - lcpriest 10y ago
        If you are a paying customer :)

znpy 10y ago

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). Next time, buy a Lenovo tablet.

criley2 10y ago
>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.
- GeorgeHahn 10y ago
  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.
  - op00to 10y ago
    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.

lucb1e 10y ago

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.

vacri 10y ago
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" :)
- JonRB 10y ago
  Do you know where I could read about this? I can't find anythign about it at all.
  - kristianp 10y ago
    http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/apple-keeps-warranty-switch-under-wraps-20130318-2gahc.html http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/apple-k...
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  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.

noonespecial 10y ago

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.

arekkas 10y ago

The day they made batteries unreplaceable was the day I decided to never buy HTC ever again

na85 10y ago
I hope you don't buy Apple.

Robadob 10y ago

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.

adarshr 10y ago

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?

67726e 10y ago
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.
- dabockster 10y ago
  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.
nextos 10y ago
Good you had bought from Amazon. 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.

nikanj 10y ago

That's what you get for living in a socialist hellhole. In freedomland, you get to sue the company.

dang 10y ago
Please don't do this here. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12155451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12155451 and marked it off-topic.

baby 10y ago

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).

ankushnarula 10y ago

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.

misingnoglic 10y ago

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...

murjinsee 10y ago

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.

woliveirajr 10y ago
Could you tell more about the LG G4? 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.
- jjaredsimpson 10y ago
  I have a G4 and I can feel myself getting emotional and doubting grandparent. I both want to and don't want to know.
- jonathanyc 10y ago
  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.
Retr0spectrum 10y ago
I agree that the M8 and M9 are rather tedious to repair, but 4 hours is a bit of an exaggeration. More like 1 hour.

jor-el 10y ago

Is it common for a customer assistance to ask for your Credit Card number over the phone? Or they are having a secure telephone payment system?

putlake 10y ago

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.

SwellJoe 10y ago

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.

Too 10y ago

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.

chiefalchemist 10y ago
My takeaway was the same team designed the device and the support system. I know, doubtful. However, the do obviously share the same culture.

CodeWriter23 10y ago

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.

Taylor_OD 10y ago

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.