Aviously

Three years ago today I started this site with a complaint about Apple customer service, and since then I haven’t complained much about customer service (or anything else on here for that matter).

Well, now Samsung has gone above and beyond to mess up on Customer Support, and as the most talked about show these days likes to say: Samsung, this is your tape.

Let’s outline the story, and highlight their failings:

• • On March 30th I pre-ordered the Samsung Galaxy S8 (which I plan to review at a later date), and when I was checking out they offered a list of “Items to purchase with your order”. So naturally, I clicked a case and battery pack from the list and thought nothing of it.
    Fast forward to April 20th, when my phone and accessories showed up, and after unpacking the case, I discovered that it was for the S8+, a larger phone.
    Why they would’ve suggested it in the first place with my phone, I’ll never understand…but it happens, and I fully admit to not checking correctly and ordering the wrong item. So I headed to their website, and filed a return, on Thursday the 20th, where it said Emails will be answered within 24 hours.
  • 36 hours later, late Friday afternoon the 21st, I still hadn’t heard back to my online submission, so I replied to an earlier email experience I had had with Samsung, hoping for a back door into customer service.
    On Wednesday, April 26th, 6 days after I had filed online I still hadn’t heard back to my online submission, but Samsung finally replied to my email, asking me to outline the problem and what I wanted to return.
    In between April 20 and 26th I tried calling their order support hotline a few times, and each time I waited on hold for 45+ minutes before giving up and saying I’d try again the next day.
  • Friday, April 28th, still awaiting a response to my updated return, I tweeted Samsung, asking them if there was any way to make my Request move any faster since it had been a week, and I had barely heard a peep.
    And on Sunday, April 30th, it seemed like I finally had a breakthrough, as “Elvie” from Samsung Support replied asking me to delete my tweet and continue the conversation in Direct Messaging.
    But as soon as I played nice and deleted my Tweet (which prevents them from having complaints on social media), Elvie proceeded to tell me that even though we asked you to DM us, we aren’t really able to help you, and you should call us instead.
  • This is where things got interesting. “Elvie” gave me a number to call Samsung at, and on Monday afternoon I decided to give them another try, even though I had tried multiple times with no luck at getting through after hours on hold.
    Now I am going to share the message with you, but keep in mind, you won’t notice Samsung’s mistake, just like I didn’t:
    Thanks to Twitter and my phone playing nicely together, you can see above that it was a clickable link so that I can call. So I clicked the number and it rang once and was immediately picked up. The machine message said:

    Thanks for calling. As a promotion, you are elligible to recieve $100 off your next purchase, please hold to recieve more details.
    Are you over 55 years old? If so, press 1 for even more offers.

    This didn’t sound right to me…so I hung up, reclicked the phone number in the link and hit Call again.
    This time when that above message came on,  I decided Samsung must just have weird customer service, so I remained on the line…and then the call center in India picked up, and started asking for my personal information.

    There is no way that Samsung would be asking me for that information, such as name and address, as well as Credit Card information, before first discussing what the problem is.

    So I headed to the Google, and put that above number in, and it returned the result of “Samsung Customer Service”.
    Clicking the number on the page, I hit call and this time it said:

    Thank you for calling Samsung.

    That’s weird…not what I got a minute ago…now a little nervous about the whole thing, I hung up and checked my call history. The difference between the two calls? The first two calls, using the 800 number that Samsung gave me, was a fake, leading to a phishing/scam center. The number that Google had me call, with the same last seven digits…but an 855 number.

I was pissed. Not only had Samsung been yanking my chain for 10 days, now they had told me to call a number, that was a fake? That message in my DM from “Elvie” is a prepackaged message. There is no way that they are typing that pre-packaged junk out for every customer Tweeting at them.

Yet somehow I got one with the wrong number?
Or are they handing everyone the wrong number? Which seems highly unlikely and a big mistake for such a large company, that someone would’ve noticed at some point and fixed…this wasn’t Day 1 of customer support.

Samsung since then has reached out and finally on May 1 worked with me on one final email to try and resolve the issue.
By that point, I had given up, because the reality is, it isn’t worth spending hours to get a refund on a $20 item.

Gotta prioritize sometimes.