No one's immune; I myself was finally escalated at my fourth 360. Like everyone else in the service chain, Andrew, my personal representative, was extremely polite, patient and apologetic to the point of personal contrition. He vaguely alluded to compensation for the inconvenience, which I never got; he offered to expedite both the "shipback box" (you have to put your broken 360 into a specific shipping box, which Microsoft provides) and the repaired 360 to overnight service; each later arrived by UPS 3-day. I remarked that he appeared to have no more authority than the regular service reps at technical support, a claim he vehemently denied. But throughout the process I was the one kept waiting. "Due to Microsoft policy," he was unable to do much other than say he was sorry.
Other customers with recently failed 360s and I made some specific requests - Zephyr hardware (the newly released chipset without a bad reputation), brand new system, replacement cabling, loaner console - during support calls. Technician responses to identical queries exhibited astonishing variety, and no one seemed to be reading from the same script. Some seemed unsure what they could and could not offer, some didn't understand what we were asking for, some apologized and said that all they could do was send a box.
One common thread did bind the responses: In the end, the answer was always no. It would seem that the only standard policy is that it is the customer, not the company, who is inconvenienced.
Red Alert
"I know the refurbished ones are a crapshoot," Callihan says, "so I asked if I could pay extra for one with the updated hardware. They said it was against policy."
Presumably Microsoft has no idea what's causing the problem, or no idea how to fix it on the pre-Zephyr hardware, and is unwilling to scrap the entire batch. There is no benefit to infuriating customers by perennially shipping failure-prone refurbished consoles. But Microsoft has proven hesitant to adopt an ultimate solution: To play the E.T. cartridges card and bury the flawed consoles far out in the wastes, to be unearthed by future generations of archaeologists. This would be wasteful, of course, and expensive - more than $1 billion set aside could cover - but it would get rid of any failure-prone consoles remaining in the wild.
But while that may be the most surefire way to deal with the problem, a global recall and desert entombment isn't actually necessary. There's a much better solution, one that would please customers and allow Microsoft to continue cheerfully shipping broken consoles. It's low-price, it's obvious and it can be deployed now, today. It'll solve the problem in a single stroke.
When a customer calls support with a failure that cannot be corrected over the phone, send them a replacement. Right then. Right there. Tell him to ship the broken one back in the same box. He'll never see it again. This way, even refurbished replacements with multiple failures - though annoying - won't be nearly as maddening for customers. In fact, it'll make people feel warm and fuzzy toward a company that's clearly trying to make things right and minimize customer inconvenience. When there's only a three- or four-day space between reporting the problem and getting a replacement, it's just not a big deal. The real question is why Microsoft isn't doing this.
A Microsoft spokesperson responded: "It is standard procedure that customer service first try to repair an original console, and Microsoft's customer service team is well equipped to ensure that the repair process goes smoothly." While I agree that getting your original console back might be preferable, it's also a lot slower. And the repeated failures experienced by many users suggest that the repair process isn't nearly so smooth as Microsoft indicates.
Flavors of the month being what they are, 360 failures don't get much coverage anymore. But that doesn't mean the problem has gone away. For many customers, the approaching holiday season is going to be one of frustration and delay. As loudly and often as Microsoft has claimed that the 360 return process is customer-centric, the opposite is increasingly true. The greatest frustration of all is that the solution is obvious and affordable.
If only it weren't against policy.
