Helio and I are not off to the best of starts. If you’re not in the mood for a rant, you may want to skip this post.
When attempting to order the phone online, their website couldn’t process my address for some reason, and told me to call them instead. Not to be thwarted so easily, I called them up to put in my order. When doing so I made a point of going over no less than three times with the woman that I wanted it shipped to my work address and not my billing address, since I wouldn’t be at home to receive the package. She assured me this was no problem and took both addresses.
A week later, I notice on the FedEx tracking page that the phone is out for delivery that day, but the FedEx truck has already come and gone and my phone has not arrived. Looking closer, I see that the destination is listed as “Redmond, WA” (where I live) instead of “Bellevue, WA” (where I work). A small part of me dies inside as I realize what’s coming.
I call FedEx, and sure enough they’ve shipped it to my condo instead of work. The great thing about this situation is that the recipient isn’t allowed to change the address, only the sender can. So I give Helio a call, and this is where things really start to go south.
After patiently explaining the situation to their customer service rep, she tells me that they aren’t allowed to contact FedEx. I observe that that’s barking mad, and that they must have contacted FedEx before or they wouldn’t be able to ship packages in the first place. She tells me there’s nothing they can do, and I say that means that either they will leave the package on my front doorstep (since FedEx told me there wasn’t a signature requirement on it), or they will keep trying to deliver it unsuccessfully until they return it, which would take at least another week, probably two.
She told me that it definitely had a signature requirement on it (as surely as it had been shipped to the correct address, I suppose) and that once it got returned to them they could either send it out to the correct address or refund my money.
I told her that I wasn’t going to wait two weeks for it to bounce around the system and return to them; they should do one of refund my money now, ship me another one overnight to the correct address at their expense, or – and this, I emphasized, was by far the most sensible solution – call FedEx and fix the mistake they’d made. She apologized profusely about being unable to do any of these things.
At this point we were about 20 minutes into the call, and I insisted that I speak with a manager: “If you can’t do anything, give me someone who can.”
It took (I kid you not) another 40 minutes of holding to get a manager on the line. And not 40 minutes of staring at my thumbs, either. 40 minutes of being told “it’ll be just another few minutes” every 5 minutes or so.
There was actually a point around the 30 minute mark where I said: “You can’t call FedEx. You can’t refund my money. You can’t take any form of responsibility for the mistake you made. What exactly are you good for?” Her response: “I can get you a manager.” To which I replied quite sharply: “I’m not convinced you can.”
Finally after 40 minutes had past, I spoke with the manager. I told my story again, and she told me she would call FedEx right away. I held for about 15 more minutes, and she came back and told me it was all taken care of and the address had been corrected. I sang her praises (which was far kinder than the things I had been considering saying in those 15 minutes) and, with my cell phone battery circling the drain, hung up at last and got back to work. All was well.
Until!
Today I saw on the tracking page that it had departed on the truck again, but the address was still Redmond. I thought to myself it was probably just legacy data in the tracking software, but figured I’d better call FedEx just to be safe.
I called FedEx, and they told me that the only call they had on record was the one I had made yesterday, and that they had the address change, but since they had that I was the one who made it, it hadn’t been approved, and therefore the driver was attempting to deliver it to the incorrect one again.
If I had been a cartoon, I’m fairly certain my head would have exploded at this point. Steam from the ears and a train whistle at the very least.
This time the conversation with Helio only took about half an hour, mostly because from the moment I got an actual person on the phone I demanded to speak with a manager right away. She called FedEx and (at my insistence) put us in a three-way call so I could absolutely confirm that the address was now correct and approved in their system, that Helio and not myself had made the change, and that (assuming it didn’t get left on my doorstep) when it went out tomorrow it would go the correct place this time.
Around 5 PM when I checked the tracking page, I saw this:
Turns out the signature wasn’t as required as the representative claimed! Chalk another success up to Helio.
Things now pretty much came down to whether or not anybody would see and decide to walk off with a $200 phone before I got home. Thankfully no one did (although I certainly know who I’m not thanking).
Thinking the worst was over, I called Helio to activate my phone and transfer my current cell number. This turned out to be another hour long phone call as I fought with a completely incompetent CSR who, after several time-consuming false starts and finally establishing what I wanted to do and what my information was, found that there was a mysterious “problem” with my application. After about fifteen minutes of holding she was able to escalate it to their corporate level, at which point she assured me it would be fixed, and that I should “call back in three hours” and they would give me my activation code then.
I called back in exactly three hours, and got the message that their offices were now closed.
So that’s where I am right now. Tomorrow morning I’ll attempt to call again. It should be the last time I have to call, but I’m through with holding my breath.
It’s hard not to get angry with this brand of customer “service”. I have heard the phrase “I’m sorry” more times over the past two days than I can hope to count. I would have traded every apology for a single uttering of “I’ll fix that”.
I cannot emphasize this enough: do NOT buy from Helio. You are in for a world of hurt if you do. If you’re as single-minded about it as I’ve wound up being (so far, anyway; I may have the phone in my hands now but it’s not like it works yet), buy from a brick and mortar store where they will be bloody well accountable for the things they do.
That’s all I have to say.
Also, I got kicked out of a swing dancing club for attempting to grease the palm of the bouncer to let in a friend whose ID had expired.
Night, all!
Dan.