Dear OnePlus,
The grief I have been subjected to after having purchased a
One is inferior only to how depressed I feel when I think about how I have been
the only person who has consistently been facing problems from the defective phone
that was delivered to me. Every single person I know who owns the One is more
than happy with it, and no one person has faced more than a single problem with
it (at most), to the best of my knowledge. (This obviously excludes the common
bugs that your OS updates have brought with them.) Why I had to get the one
defective piece that has made my life hell in the past one year (since December
2014), I do not know. Me having to make 6 trips to the Service Center in 11
months is a very painful thing indeed. Painful for me; shameful for you. Truly!
Being someone who is more than tech-savvy and especially being
someone who takes great care of his electronic products, it is a testament to
exactly how terribly faulty the product I received is. But please, by all
means, don’t take my word for that. At this stage of the customer experience
journey, I don’t really expect your team to perform the terribly difficult
activities of understanding and assisting, anyway.
I understand that your company enjoys a terrific reputation;
and that your products have been very well-received by the global market. They
are truly masterpieces. There’s no disputing that. Great technology efficiently
wrapped into a cost-effective package, running a very smooth and
fully-customizable Operating System. Sounds like a dream. And it is. Until it
turns into someone’s nightmare. And while the odds are that it’s just one guy
that that happens to, that one guy is me, so excuse me if I don’t say, “Aw
well! It’s a great company, and a brilliant phone; so let’s just go the General
Motors way and say that this particular piece isn’t broken, it just doesn’t ‘function
to design’.”
What sickens me the most about the Customer Service I have
faced from your team so far is that the experiences have left me unsure as to
whether I should even be expecting anyone from your team to read this fully.
Without further ado, let me briefly describe some of the lovely experiences I
have had thus far:-
1. For the first 8 months that I had this phone, I
couldn’t even use it as a phone. People couldn’t hear what I was saying on
calls, while I could hear them clearly. Literally 8 months and many, many,
unappreciative tweets later, your team agreed to help me out with the problem.
After further delays, no actual assistance being provided, more tweets and Direct
Messages on Twitter, your team actually took proper notice of my problem, and
solved my issue in a mere 36 hours. The solution was shocking. A Call Recorder App
was the issue! Uninstalling that solved my problem immediately. Whether it was
worse that a 5 minute resolution took your team 8 and a half months to provide,
or whether it was worse that I couldn’t run a basic call recorder app on my
phone, I could not decide. But since, in those 8 months, your team kept
bouncing me back and forth between hardware and software issues, not even sure
what the nature of the issue was, I really shouldn’t be surprised. By the way,
they also made me flash my phone twice, erasing all my data. (Yes, with my
consent; calm down!) And did I mention that they told me it was a standard bug
that was faced by all Ones, due to which I waited desperately not only for an
upgrade to the initial CM11S I was running, but also to a subsequent update for
CM12 to be rolled out? Only after all that happened did the Twitter Torture
that spawned the actual resolution come to pass.
Its worth noting that while the audio problem
was nowhere close to as consistent as before, people still complained that they
couldn’t hear me properly a fair few times. And as things would have it, I
couldn’t hear them a lot too. Experimenting by putting my SIM in another phone
proved the obvious: my One had connectivity issues. Even with a superior chipset,
my phone wasn’t picking up signals properly from what is supposedly the best
network in my country.
2. As if this wasn’t enough, a while later, an
update to the phone was released, following which the phone would hang and spontaneously
reboot while I was using it. Randomly! And sometimes, it would switch off,
and while rebooting, get stuck at the OnePlus Logo screen and then reboot again;
and this cycle of getting stuck and rebooting would keep repeating until I
manually powered down the device and then switched it on again. This caused
untold horrors in certain financial transactions and important phone calls I was
in the middle of at the time. Sure, it is isn’t something I hold you
responsible for, but I’m sure you agree: Sucks to be me, eh?!
With the latest update that you rolled out,
it seemed that the rebooting issue had been resolved. Or so I thought. So I
thought, because I didn’t see it reboot like that for a full 24 hours after
installing the update. Turns out I may have been foolishly ignoring the fact that
I barely used my phone during those 24 hours.
3. Which brings me to what happened at the end of
those 24 hours: I woke up late the next morning, to realize that my phone’s alarm
hadn’t gone off. I knew my phone had had more than sufficient charge when I had
gone to bed, so when I saw that the phone was off, I knew something was wrong.
I thought that maybe the phone still had that bug and that it had switched off
instead of rebooting, as has happened a couple of times in the past. I couldn’t
have been further from the truth; because my phone never powered on after that.
Ever! After trying the remedy the OnePlus website suggests: the 12 hour rest - 6
+ 1 hours charge drill TWICE, I took my One to the Official Service Center
yesterday. The kind of utterly ridiculous nonsense I faced there yesterday will
be something that most people will find hard to believe; at least most people
outside India, anyway. Truly ludicrous events transpired, I assure you (which I
shall detail separately, in the near future); after which the service
representative tells me that the device hardware is faulty and that the Main
Board is the faulty component. He asked me to produce the Original Invoice for
the phone, post which he said the Replacement Process would start. But wait! He
suddenly asked me where I purchased the phone, and when I told him I’d bought
it in the United States, he said that OnePlus had rescinded their International
Warranty, and that their warranty terms only covered phones purchased in India.
He then went on to show me a document / image on his phone that was a directive
from OnePlus to its Indian Service Centers, saying pretty much the same thing:
rescinding International Warranty as of July 2015. When I asked him to bottom line
it for me, and tell me how much the repairs would cost, he told me it would
come out to Rs. 18,000. The current market price for a OnePlus One in India is
Rs. 19,999 (Amazon India Price listing).
I would like to ask you a few things, at this point:-
A. I bought the phone only because I knew there
would be Service Centers in India, and that you had an International Warranty
Policy. In which twisted universe do you think it is fair for you to just
change your Warranty Policy, and screw people over that way?!
B. Did no one tell you that if you want to materially
change important product-related policies such as International Warranty
Policies, if you bring them into effect on a particular date, that the change
in policy should only be applicable to units purchased after the date of such
implementation? For Example, your July 2015 policy should be applicable only to
phones you sell after the day you change that policy. If you did it on the 15th,
sales from the 16th should fall under that category. Worst comes
worst, you could count sales from the 15th itself. That isn’t how I
would run my organization, but if you did that, at least you would have implemented
the change officially before making the operational changes. But just how are
you so comfortable with making retrospective changes such as these that greatly
affect (adversely, obviously) your customers? From no angle whatsoever does
that even remotely reflect even the shadow of an infinitesimal fragment of the
Never Settle spirit you boast.
C. This isn’t just about Customer Experience. Are
you truly okay with taking someone’s money in exchange for what you claim to be
a high-end phone, but is actually a defective piece of hardware? Are you really
that kind of an organization? One that doesn’t differentiate between Blood
Money and Fair Corporate Earnings. Or do you actually see this as fair earning?
Part of the corporate profit-making cycle?
E. Poor Customer Service is something I am not new
to, given how things are run by most corporations in India. However, there are
certain organizations I expect better from. Apple, for one. I’m just
disappointed that I thought your organization was one of them, and that I purchased
a One over an iPhone. A very costly mistake, as it turns out.
Unsettled,
S. Sylesh!
