Let me tell you my WakeMate story. Its publication has been long overdue. It's a bit long, so please bear with me...
I pre-ordered. All excited. I love "life hacks", and this is right up my alley. Even encouraged several friends to jump in on the WakeMate wagon!
It finally arrived, and for the most part it worked. The app was buggy at first (iOS), but they did eventually get some updates approved that made things better. The algorithms employed on the website are questionable. They seemed to weigh certain variables a bit counter-intuitively, but what do I know. I went with it, charging it every other day and sleeping with it at night.
It was a bit snug, but I stretched it out and it was comfortable enough. The "WakeMate" logo stuff wore off in a matter of days though.
They emailed me a few days after receiving it saying to NOT use the charger that came with it because it was faulty and might catch on fire. Yikes. They never sent me a replacement. I just carried on with another standard USB charger.
Then, at some point, my WM started refusing to sync with the app. I submitted a trouble ticket, and they responded about a week later acknowledging a hardware bug. They requested that I send the original unit back to them in NoCal and proceeded to send me a new unit.
I didn't send the unit back to them, mostly out of sheer laziness. But, also, they were rather presumptuous in telling me to send the unit back. No mention was made of postage, or the inconvenience to me.
A new unit arrived and worked for about a week. Same exact problem. I submitted another trouble ticket and got NO RESPONSE. Never even an acknowledgement.
Months go by... crickets. Silence. Nothing. I mentally give up. At this point I had two dead WM's and I really didn't care about it any more, because my excitement was quite high, and I was really disappointed, mostly in the extremely poor customer service.
Then one day, someone at WM (apparently) decided to email everyone who had WMs that still needed to be sent back. Only this time it was more of a rather rude demand, not so much of a request. Again, no mention of postage, or apology, or anything remotely friendly.
The worst part of this? They CC'd all of us in a single email! So yah, we now had not only been treated pretty poorly in terms of customer service from a company with a broken product, but we were also being publicly shamed for it!
Now I cared again.
I was rather disgusted. I replied to all to share my disgust. Others replied to all and were considerably more vocal than me about their own disgust. That was ugly. After some time, they sent out another email admitting they should have BCCd us instead. Yah, amateur hour.
I never got any sort of acknowledgement after mailing the two units back to them. I can only assume they received them. I waited a full month before contacting them again.
This time I've asked that they reimburse me for my WM as well as the postage I incurred. After that I'm not interested in doing any further business with them. Still no response, other than a robot email saying they have lots of support requests blah blah blah.
This is sad because I really wanted to like this company! :(
Update: About 24 hours after I posted this I received a full refund for my Wakemate along with an apologetic email. No consideration was made for the postage I paid to send their defective products back to them. Oh well. For now, I'm just happy to put this ugly scene behind me.
I pre-ordered. All excited. I love "life hacks", and this is right up my alley. Even encouraged several friends to jump in on the WakeMate wagon!
It finally arrived, and for the most part it worked. The app was buggy at first (iOS), but they did eventually get some updates approved that made things better. The algorithms employed on the website are questionable. They seemed to weigh certain variables a bit counter-intuitively, but what do I know. I went with it, charging it every other day and sleeping with it at night.
It was a bit snug, but I stretched it out and it was comfortable enough. The "WakeMate" logo stuff wore off in a matter of days though.
They emailed me a few days after receiving it saying to NOT use the charger that came with it because it was faulty and might catch on fire. Yikes. They never sent me a replacement. I just carried on with another standard USB charger.
Then, at some point, my WM started refusing to sync with the app. I submitted a trouble ticket, and they responded about a week later acknowledging a hardware bug. They requested that I send the original unit back to them in NoCal and proceeded to send me a new unit.
I didn't send the unit back to them, mostly out of sheer laziness. But, also, they were rather presumptuous in telling me to send the unit back. No mention was made of postage, or the inconvenience to me.
A new unit arrived and worked for about a week. Same exact problem. I submitted another trouble ticket and got NO RESPONSE. Never even an acknowledgement.
Months go by... crickets. Silence. Nothing. I mentally give up. At this point I had two dead WM's and I really didn't care about it any more, because my excitement was quite high, and I was really disappointed, mostly in the extremely poor customer service.
Then one day, someone at WM (apparently) decided to email everyone who had WMs that still needed to be sent back. Only this time it was more of a rather rude demand, not so much of a request. Again, no mention of postage, or apology, or anything remotely friendly.
The worst part of this? They CC'd all of us in a single email! So yah, we now had not only been treated pretty poorly in terms of customer service from a company with a broken product, but we were also being publicly shamed for it!
Now I cared again.
I was rather disgusted. I replied to all to share my disgust. Others replied to all and were considerably more vocal than me about their own disgust. That was ugly. After some time, they sent out another email admitting they should have BCCd us instead. Yah, amateur hour.
I never got any sort of acknowledgement after mailing the two units back to them. I can only assume they received them. I waited a full month before contacting them again.
This time I've asked that they reimburse me for my WM as well as the postage I incurred. After that I'm not interested in doing any further business with them. Still no response, other than a robot email saying they have lots of support requests blah blah blah.
This is sad because I really wanted to like this company! :(