Friday, January 5, 2007
My Experience With Zune Support
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Zune Talk" @ 08:00 AM
During the phone call the line went dead, I think from their end. I had given the first tech my number, but he hadn't given me a case number or anything similar. I waited about five minutes for him to call me back, but he didn't (they probably can't call outside the USA) so I phoned back. I talked to a second tech, and he was able to look up my account and case number. He said I was in their database three times - and quoted me a very old address - so I knew they were looking at Xbox Live account data. We managed to find the correct account, and he added call notes to it.
Here's how they normally deal with defective Zunes: they send the customer a box with a pre-paid courier coupon, the customer puts the Zune in the box, calls the courier for pickup, and off goes the Zune at no cost to the customer. The Zune is then repaired or replaced, and the customer gets it back. This is how Compaq dealt with their Pocket PCs a few years ago, and I was really impressed by the whole experience. The bad news for me being in Canada is that they won't allow me to ship my two defective Zunes directly to them. The tech said they'll only accept the Zunes if they're processed via their system. So here's how it would need to go down:
- I'd ship my Zunes to someone in the USA
- Zune tech support would ship that someone the courier shipping boxes
- That someone would send back my Zunes
- The Zune techs would repair/replace my Zunes (2-3 weeks)
- The Zune techs would ship back the Zunes to that someone in the USA
- That someone in the USA would ship the Zunes back to me
All in all I'd say that the Zune tech support was quite good - almost no wait time, polite and smart techs. They weren't able to help me out much, but it's not their fault Microsoft hasn't launched the Zune in Canada yet. I've tried calling in a favour with someone on the Microsoft Zune team directly, and I haven't heard back in two days, so I'm leaning toward taking the Zunes with me to Las Vegas when I leave tonight and trying the old retail swap there. Not ideal, but better than being Zune-less for a month and a half. Community, what do you think?