On the 5th of September, 3 full business days after they had received my console, I called and spoke with a supervisor by the name of Tom. Tom told me that my console had not been taken care of yet, that Mike had erred in promising a 2-3 day turn around. A Microsoft employee providing false information? I was shocked. It was not to be the last time. At any rate, Tom promised (with a confirmation) that it would ship within 7 days of its arrival at the repair depot. Lovely. Still plenty of time before Halo 3 though.
On the 8th of September, 8 days since they had gotten my 360, I called again and spoke with a supervisor named Tyler. Tyler was smart / honest enough not to make any promises. He merely stated that Tom and Mike should not have done so and that the total processing time for the whole repair/replacement cycle was currently 3-4 weeks. I inquired if Microsoft was planning on making good on either of the earlier promises I was made. It was not. I requested to be sent up another level or transferred to someone in the complaints department. I was denied, though he did suggest I write a letter to the legal department. I declined.
For your personal reference, filing a Better Business Bureau (BBB) complaint online is both easy and therapeutic. I recommend it to anyone frustrated with customer service (or lack thereof). My complaint was based on the failure of Microsoft to honor either of the promises I had been made. Slow is one thing, lying is entirely different.
Go team! None of the people I spoke to seemed anywhere near this energetic or happy.
So I called them again in a couple days, the 12th I think, to see if anything had happened. To my great surprise, nothing had happened. I was given some excuse that they had so many consoles to replace that they were waiting on new units from China. My amusement factor was very low. I casually mentioned that I had filed a BBB complaint on my customer service experience so far (complete with names). This seemed to spark some interest.
Enough interest that Microsoft actually called me two days later, on the 14th. I’m still not sure which unit inside Microsoft it was (the upper echelon of Xbox support, legal?), but they had good news, my 360 had been send out (by ground) that very day! Of course they didn’t admit any fault on Microsoft’s part, but she was very apologetic about the amount of time it had taken and assured me that I should not have been promised anything in the first place. Whatever. It was in the UPS system with a scheduled delivery on the 19th. Well before the launch of Halo 3 (the biggest media launch to date) on the 25th.
This is the point at which events went from annoying to absurd.
