harley
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
I have a small side business doing reselling to my former employer, so I buy a lot of stuff from a lot of companies. Mostly biggies like Apple, Dell, Amazon, B&H Photo, like that. Great companies to deal with, for the most part. But I also have to order things from smaller, newer companies, and have had various experiences with them service-wise. But this one is hitting new lows.
I ordered a couple of cutting edge gaming computers from a company called Razer. They are ~$4500 each. No big deal, business as usual. And cool! They include a free high end mini Bluetooth speaker worth $179. So I place the order and expect delivery in 3-5 business days, which is what my client wants and expects.
I got an email yesterday saying the order is delayed because the speakers are unavailable, with no expected delivery date. So the entire order is delayed indefinitely because they won't ship anything until it's all ready to go. Dumb, but fixable. Just drop the freebie from the order, and ship the actually ordered item. But it turns out it's impossible to talk to an actual human being there at Razer, unless you are calling for technical support. And those guys don't have access to the sales department. Going to sales through the VRU gets you a "send an email, and have a nice day" followed by a hang-up.
So I send the email. Each email is going to be answered within 1-2 business days. The first response is "Are you sure you want to cancel the order?" I don't, I just want the useless POS that's holding up the order removed. Well, it turns out the order can't be separated like that. I would have to cancel the order, and reorder specifying that the speaker not be included. But they won't release the hold on the credit card funds for up to two weeks. And most fun of all is that the Description field in the Customer Support email form only allows 500 characters. If you've read this far, you can see that I can't piss and moan appropriately in that few characters. I keep running out of space and having to condense.
So, I can get around this by using a different CC. I could actually use the same one (large credit line), but that would probably cause the CC company to deny the charge, what with that large a charge twice to an obscure company in a short period of time.
None of this is insurmountable, but jeez! It would be so easy to fix if I could just talk to someone. I guess since the huge majority of their customers are major gamers that never leave the basement they figure there's no reason to allow for actual human communication. And I can't even say I'll never order from them again, since I buy what my customer wants. Oh well. </rant>
I ordered a couple of cutting edge gaming computers from a company called Razer. They are ~$4500 each. No big deal, business as usual. And cool! They include a free high end mini Bluetooth speaker worth $179. So I place the order and expect delivery in 3-5 business days, which is what my client wants and expects.
I got an email yesterday saying the order is delayed because the speakers are unavailable, with no expected delivery date. So the entire order is delayed indefinitely because they won't ship anything until it's all ready to go. Dumb, but fixable. Just drop the freebie from the order, and ship the actually ordered item. But it turns out it's impossible to talk to an actual human being there at Razer, unless you are calling for technical support. And those guys don't have access to the sales department. Going to sales through the VRU gets you a "send an email, and have a nice day" followed by a hang-up.
So I send the email. Each email is going to be answered within 1-2 business days. The first response is "Are you sure you want to cancel the order?" I don't, I just want the useless POS that's holding up the order removed. Well, it turns out the order can't be separated like that. I would have to cancel the order, and reorder specifying that the speaker not be included. But they won't release the hold on the credit card funds for up to two weeks. And most fun of all is that the Description field in the Customer Support email form only allows 500 characters. If you've read this far, you can see that I can't piss and moan appropriately in that few characters. I keep running out of space and having to condense.
So, I can get around this by using a different CC. I could actually use the same one (large credit line), but that would probably cause the CC company to deny the charge, what with that large a charge twice to an obscure company in a short period of time.
None of this is insurmountable, but jeez! It would be so easy to fix if I could just talk to someone. I guess since the huge majority of their customers are major gamers that never leave the basement they figure there's no reason to allow for actual human communication. And I can't even say I'll never order from them again, since I buy what my customer wants. Oh well. </rant>
