What is going on over at Ultimate Ears???

[Michael415]

Man this is ridiculous! I bought a pair of the triple.fi pro's less then a month ago and the bass driver goes out. Fine, faulty drivers happen no biggie. I email them 6 days ago to get an RMA and still getting jerked around?? First email, generic fill out this questionnaire send it back and hear nothing for 4 days, so I shoot off another email, and instead of instructions and an RMA number to send them in on I get a flippant email asking some more info (not iem related) and then she will send the info... What gives, I thought their CS was supposed to be great, but this is pathetic, a week to get an RMA, I hate to think how long it will take to get it back. I have 3 iem's from UE, but if this doesn't get resolved quick, never again and totally forget the ue-11 pro's I was going to get in November as a treat for myself. Guess I shoulda gone with freq's.

[channum]

I'm in a similar boat (you're just more patient than me to have let it go a week). Monday night the housing on my super.fi 5 pros cracked apart, destroying them. I fired off their webform immediately. Tuesday afternoon, nothing. Fire off another web form RMA request, but a few hours later, still nothing. Fire off an email. Right at what must have been closing time, I finally got the generic email asking for most of the same information they should have already had. Now the entire business day of Wednesday has come and gone and nothing else from them.

The irony is that Monday morning I ordered triple.fi 10s based on my great impressions of my super.fi 5s. I'm sitting here listening to them and very impressed, but if something doesn't change in the very near future, I suspect I'm going to be eating some restocking fees. Better to lose $35 now, than everything down the road if they prove no more reliable than the super.fis that failed catastrophically after only about two months of regular use.

If I haven't received an RMA by tomorrow before lunch time, California time, I'll be on their phone line fuming. It's not rocket science to figure out that headphones with cracked housing need replaced.

[Michael415]

lol, not that I am so very patient, just so swamped at work no time to call. But considering the unbelievably slow responses I will make the time. I can't help but wonder if they made another run of bad iem's, like the super.fi 5's a few years ago that cracked casing for no reason and they are swamped with repairs.
BTW the triple.fi's sound amazing but if they prove to be unreliable its a bit of a moot point.

[Matteman]

I don't get this either, it's like they choose some customers to treat well and some to ignore.

I, like many others, have always gotten the best customer service. The responces are really fast, I mean like seven minutes-fast. They don't just answer my questions, they follow up and ask me how I'm doing with my customs and how I like them.

Heck, they even let me have a second pair of customs after an artwork screw-up they did!

[J.D.N]

Originally Posted by Matteman

I don't get this either, it's like they choose some customers to treat well and some to ignore.

Sadly i think this is true, contributing factors being size of your wallet and the country you are in. This is based on my own personal experiences and highlights like the one above. It doesn't surprise me, it's indicative of most companies i guess. Just unlucky if you get the sour end of things.

Hope you guys have some better luck!

[Matteman]

Originally Posted by J.D.N

Sadly i think this is true, contributing factors being size of your wallet and the country you are in.

I'm not sure the size of the customer's wallet has anything to do with it.

I have always been getting great service when I was a Super.fi customer, receiving not less than SIX new pairs of Super.fi earphones (three SF5 Pro's and three SF5 EB's) without them even asking questions. Some of those were clearly my own fault, and they could easily have said no referring to their warrant policies.

Like I said before, my experience with UE customer support is nothing short of amazing.

[Michael415]

Im sorry but I really don't excuse second rate CS because any one of my iem's wasn't as much as the top of the line custom. Also I won't purchase if at all possible from a company that would blatantly tier its cs so such an extreme amount. I will call in the morning and I hope they have a very good excuse, otherwise I may just try and shove these back to earphonesolutions and eat their restock fee. Not willing to support a company that subscribes to that philosophy, they should stand equally strong behind the superfi. 3's all the way up to the 11's.

[HPM]

im going to have to go with matteman here, even though mine were my fault, and i didn't have Proof of Purchase anymore, and that they were the old model, i've had 3 superi.fi 5 EB replacements and more....true it doesn't say much about product reliability, but still a rocksolid warranty

[Michael415]

I finally got a chance to call and got a RMA. These will arrive monday. Will be interesting if they stick to their quoted week turn around. So far not very impressed, almost a 10min phone wait and the person on the phone as less then friendly, but at least did do her job.

[silverknit3]

Personally, Super.fi. CM isn't exactly the best to me. I emailed them about 4 times and mind you, repeating my information in 3/4 of my emails. Finally after 4 emails and waiting a day between each one, they told me to refer to the website. I honestly think they were either playign with a rubik's cube or somethign whenanswering my emails or simply taking the easier route to things because it seemed as if they wanted to shake me off pretty quickly.

[WhiteShadow]

Well that's odd. My triple fi's housing cracked about a week ago. I sent an email and promptly received a response(with RMA number and shipping information) within 24hrs. I sent the earphone to UE about 3 days ago.

[HeadphoneAddict]

I bought my daughter a pair of Red Super.fi 5 Pro for Xmas, but she had the cable socket break on the flight to Germany for spring break. Having gone with her school mates, I wasn't there to give her a back-up pair, so she spent the whole 10 trip with just one side of the earphonesworking. I was upset when she returned and I called UE for an RMA. They gave me one over the phone, and I sent in the broken earphones with no other accessories but the cable.

Within 10 days I had the new pair (Black, because red was discontinued) and they sent everything in a new box, with the case, tips, etc. While my daughter was without them she took a fancy to my JVC FX66 air-cushion, so she didn't want the S.fi 5 when they came back - didn't trust them not to break again so she requested to keep the JVC. I ended up keeping and using the Super.fi 5 Pro for myself.

But UE customer service was good. Only thing is that I now can't remember what I did with the receipt after I copied it for them. Do you suppose they kept the copy og proof of purchase in case I need warrantee work again in the future?

[younglee200]

i got very good CS from UEs when my UE-3s broke after few weeks of use. They were friendly with answering my questions.

I too don't think that the amount of money you spend really has to do anything with the quality CS you're going to get. I'd suspect it has more to do with your luck than anything.

[channum]

I finally got my RMA yesterday evening, nearly four full business days from the initial report. I got a second email from them on Thursday nearly 72 hours from the time I made my first report and 48 hours after their first email. It basically told me to calm down, the RMA process takes from 24 to 48 hours to complete (um, did this person not realise that sounded pretty dumb in my case?), plus they asked me AGAIN if I had proof of purchase.

At any rate, I now have an RMA and I have a better feel for the incompetence of UE's customer support.

1. Registering with them seems to be largely pointless. They don't actually use ANY of the data from the web form in the process.
2. They can set up auto-respond emails for their monthly contest web form, but not the RMA request web form. Which of these goes the furthest in keeping the customer pleased?
3. Customer service is a secondary job for someone or someones that isn't handled full time. That, or their incompetent implementation of automating the RMA process results in them tied up on the phone all day with angry customers so they can't actually process the "automated" system that got the customers angry in the first place.
4. Speaking of automating the RMA process, how hard would it be to have a couple of drop downs, certain combinations of which, for example, a physically cracked housing and proof of purchase, resulted in the RMA number being automatically generated and sent immediately?

Regardless, I'll take a competent replacement with a new product than the faster responses I got from Sennheiser and Audio Technica in the past, neither of which were satisfactory in the end. Sennheiser managed to send me the completely wrong model of headphones (sent in PX100s, got HD500A Therapeutic Headphones in return). AT insisted on actually repairing my defunct ATH-EC7s instead of replacing them, then went on to use cheaper cabling that failed at the site of repair a bit over two months after I got them back. If I can get a new replacement in around two weeks, I'll consider it adequate.

[grawk]

So if I'm reading that right, you're saying you want UE to turn into a huge company that deals with problems quickly, but gets them wrong, rather than a small company that sometimes takes a couple days longer than you'd prefer, but actually tries to do the right thing?