
Why I’m never buying HTC again - whack
https://outlookzen.wordpress.com/2016/07/24/why-im-never-buying-htc-again/
======
adarshr
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
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
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.

------
murjinsee
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
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
I have a G4 and I can feel myself getting emotional and doubting grandparent.
I both want to and don't want to know.

------
Too
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
My takeaway was the same team designed the device and the support system. I
know, doubtful. However, the do obviously share the same culture.

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noonespecial
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.

------
znpy
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
>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
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
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
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
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" :)

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_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.

~~~
saghm
> 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.

The only time I ever went to an Apple Store for support on a laptop it did get
get fixed within a couple days, but they also replaced my fully-functional
hard drive (with all my data) when the only thing broken was the SATA cable.
The conversation I had to have with them to convince me to put my original
hard drive back in the laptop was pretty mind-numbing, going through stages of
"we don't know where the hard drive is" to "we have it, but we can't give it
back to you". I did eventually get the original hard drive back, but that
experience kind of soured me to the whole "Apple experience", one of the many
factors that eventually led me down the road to learning Linux and basic PC
repairs, allowing me to order SATA cables and the like from Amazon and replace
them in laptops myself.

------
gk1
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
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
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
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
Google has tech support?!

~~~
lcpriest
If you are a paying customer :)

------
putlake
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.

------
CodeWriter23
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.

------
Robadob
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.

------
SwellJoe
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.

------
misingnoglic
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...

------
ankushnarula
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.

------
baby
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).

------
jor-el
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?

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

~~~
na85
I hope you don't buy Apple.

------
Taylor_OD
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.

------
smt88
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).

~~~
chrisfosterelli
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
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.

