afuna | Entries tagged with customer service

I paid for a tablet end of October, with delivery set for mid-to-end November. It's the beginning of December, and no news; the company responded to my first email, telling me they're talking to the courier. My second email (sent yesterday) has had no reply.

I'm worried that it's too late to file for a chargeback, but let's say it isn't, should I tell the company I'm filing for a chargeback, or should I let the credit card company handle it? Is there a polite way to go about this?

I'm torn between giving them a chance to figure out what's going on, and trying to resolve things so I'm not out the money I paid, with nothing to show for it.

Bleh.

My 'net connection has been erratic the past couple of months: it would slow down and lose packets, but a restart of the modem generally fixed it. However, this last couple weeks it's been terrible! Ping response times reaching over 2000ms when it's normally just 200ms; lots of packets being dropped on the floor (I got 70% once on a not-so-painful day...);

After:
* many calls to our DSL provider
* them fixing something on their end, which helped a tiny bit
* getting an AVR for the modem
* telling the DSL provider that no we are not interested in upgrading because no it's not a bandwidth issue: the connection is okay when it works, it's just that it plain didn't work a lot of the time
* rewiring the phone line twice
* the DSL provider coming in this morning to tweak the last rewiring of the phone line (which had managed to kill our phone connection, not just the DSL -- no dial tone!)

I think we finally have it. Things are actually loading! the modem isn't dying! going to load media-heavy sites doesn't feel like I'm pulling teeth! it's like I'm connected again >.o I am crossing my fingers and hoping that my posting this doesn't jinx everything, but yes. More like this please.

If it stays stable, I want to upgrade our plan. It's a bit overdue for an upgrade anyway :) but it has to stay stable otherwise, ano kami, tanga (what are we, stupid)?

Anyway, I was studying their plans and right now they have: 1mbps, 3mbps, 5mbps up from 1mbps, 2mbps, 3mbps. :D We don't need the 5mbps, but I kinda want to up us to at least the middle plan (would appreciate people not telling me what you can get in your country; I really can't get much better here >_>)

DSL provider seems determined to pull defeat from the jaws of victory though; the worker who came in this morning fixed things, and then left without telling us he'd fixed things. *facepalm*

I have been trying out Plex as a media center, and I have been really happy with it! Basically before I started using Plex, I had to either sync to my laptop, or try to upload a show over wireless, which took over 10 minutes per show, and prevented me from watching any other shows while I was uploading.

Now as long as I'm on the wireless (which extends up to the dining area on a good day), I can watch my shows on my iPad from anywhere in the house. No hassle, that's pretty cool.

But then I found out that it was sharing my iPhoto library over the local network, and according to this forum post this is working as-designed. There's no way to turn it off, because the assumption is that if you're accessing your library from a local network you can be trusted. I don't mind this with movies, but personal photos are different.

Multi-computer households exist, damnit :-(

Luckily there's a workaround for this but ughhh. It feels icky to have everyone at home have unlimited access to my entire photo collection. I've gone from being squeefully happy to grudgingly glad that it works okay for movies/TV shows.

Finally buckled down and sent an email to SitePoint, instead of walking away silently. Thanks, everyone, who commented with support and helped me get over my initial sensation that I was in the wrong ♥

(I had a snarky response all in my head, and composing that was cathartic ahahaha. Then I sent off a more subdued and polite letter, which I feel makes my case stronger, because poor support people it's not like they make up the policies or anything.

But the first so cathartic, I just don't even know ahahaha :-)
)

Final word on the SitePoint thing:

I got an email back, letting me know that they've manually completed the transaction for me, and that any time I buy something from them using a credit card, their system will do the same so I should email them so they can continue to manually mark that transaction from me as complete.

I suppose I should be grateful that I don't need to send them any more proof; just need to email them a heads up. And I'm really grateful to everyone who has suggested alternatives -- thank you! If this was just about getting books, I would be on those in an instant. But all this has left a horrible taste in my mouth. I don't plan on buying SitePoint again.

I do plan to email back to thank the guy who handled my ticket, but first I need to wait until I'm over the urge to include a snippy thanks for the offer but no thanks, I won't be needing them to manually handle my future transactions because there won't be any future transactions.

My previous issue has been fixed, and without my having to do anything (yay). But a second order I did seems to be running into issues as well (boo).

So. I was not completely happy with SitePoint's initial email response which basically let me know that I'd need to send them proof that I'm not about to defraud them, because I live where I live. (I understand where it's coming from -- when I'm not rolling my eyes -- but I understand yeah, okay, sure). Before I could figure out what it was they wanted from me, exactly, my credit card company sent their payment processor the secret club handshake which let them know that I'm a reputable customer and can be trusted. Thanks Visa!

Against my better judgement, I decided to buy stuff from SitePoint again (books are so tempting). However, it's been over a day, and I still can't download the PDFs. There's no error message and I've tried logging out and logging in several times per the instructions on the website, and nothing.

I feel horribly stupid because wow I can't believe that I thought that this time would be any better. But information! Books! Damnit, I'm a sucker for anything that will feed my hunger for knowledge.

I'm emailing them now. I'm holding out hope that my current issue is unrelated. Because if this is an unrelated issue, then okay I've just had a run of bad luck (Damn you technology!). If it is still because I am from the Philippines, I don't think I'd be comfortable sending any more money their way. It wouldn't be worth the hassle to go through this each and every time, and I feel incredibly uncomfortable with being expected to.

For now, I'm going to try for giving them the benefit of the doubt. I am crossing my fingers really really hard (also working on making sure my email is as diplomatic as possible).

development corrupts

absolute development corrupts absolutely

Entries tagged with customer service

Hmm.

I had forgotten how good it is to have a net connection that doesn't suck

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Emailed SitePoint

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More SitePoint blah

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