HTC Could Care Less About Its Customers

I have a Nexus One…well, I used to have a Nexus One, but the power button stopped working and I sent it back to HTC to fix it. Except HTC would rather play games and give me misleading information rather than fix my phone. As of the day this was published, HTC “express repair” has had my phone for 14 days, and has yet to do anything beyond do an initial scan that it was received. No analysis, much less repair work, has been done on my phone and HTC cannot give me any hard and fast timeframe on when they might actually get around to fixing the known issue with the phone.

This is an e-mail I sent to HTC’s public relations department as well as The Consumerist,

Back on February 3, I purchased a Nexus One through Google, with the understanding that HTC would be responsible for repairs.

A few weeks ago, my phone developed a problem that according to reports on the Internet and from your CSRs is fairly common with the phone — the power button
began to fail. I would press it, and it wouldn’t turn off or on immediately. Finally, on June 20, 2010 the power button failed altogether.

Not a problem, I thought. I’ll just call up HTC and get it fixed. I was offered a chance to get a new/refurbished phone shipped to me and then ship my existing phone back, or do an “express repair.” Since I was told “express repair” was typically 4 to 5 business days, I opted for that.

HTC scanned my as received on June 23, 2010 (HTC Ticket: [omitted for blog post]). And, as far as I can tell, hasn’t done a damn thing with it since.

I began calling support for updates the following week. Typically, I’d call on a Tuesday and be told call back on Wednesday. I’d call back on Wednesday and be told, oh it will probably be done Thursday — call back then. Then I was told, don’t worry, it will probably be finished by July 5, but things just aren’t being updated in our database, so call back then.

Alas, despite repeated calls, no updates beyond “yes we received your phone.”

Today, however, I talked to a nice CSR who explained to me that HTC had me ship the phone to their repair center in Texas at PRECISELY THE TIME THEY WERE MOVING THAT REPAIR CENTER TO STAFFORD. Are you kidding me?

But it gets better. So I’m told by HTC CSRs that phones that were sent to Houston for repair have basically not yet been looked at. That they just sat at Houston for awhile awaiting to be redirected to Stafford. According to your CSR, if I’m lucky a technician at your Stafford center *might* finally take my
phone out of the box and examine it on July 8 or July 9.

That is, frankly, a ridiculous timetable and the lack of accurate information and tracking in this case has been absolutely bizarre. I’m tempted to just say screw it and grab a Samsung Vibrant when T-Mobile releases that on July 21, as it appears increasingly unlikely I won’t have my Nexus One back by then.

Is there anything you can do to rectify this situation?

Thank you,

Brian Carnell

P.S. you may want to reconsider your Twitter engagement (or complete lack thereof). It is very frustrating to try to engage @HTC on Twitter and realize its just a corporate PR tool account … even my cable company engages me (very helpfully) when I try to communicate with it on Twitter.

Leave a Reply