Unexpected after market support....

Once in a while you get some pretty decent after sales customer support which just means that you will have brand loyalty and an evangelist for life... or at least until something goes wrong... and the reverse is also true, sometimes you just have the shittiest support, and you end up with a pretty pissed off customer. Well, this is a story that began as the latter and finally morphed into the former....

So, I've had the Bose QC35 over ear noise cancelling headphones for a year or two now... and I've loved them, compact with great sound... they have been a great travelling companion. Until they started not being able to power down due to some problem with the Bluetooth radio constantly waking the headphones up. Needless to say, this runs the battery down pretty damn quickly... and a wireless headphone with no battery is completely useless. Well, not completely, I could still plug it in with a headphone jack...

So, after searching around... it appears that this was a known problem... and had something to do with a firmware update that was pushed out to the headphones. At the start, there were heaps of complaints... and customer reps had the authority from the company to just send out a free replacement. However, as I was late in doing the firmware update (by about half a year...)... this policy had already run it's course. Oddly enough, I keep most of computing equipment really very much up to date with security patches and everything... but peripherals, I tend to neglect a bit... a habit that I really need to change...

Anyway, my first thought was that I should reach out to customer service reps on Facebook and Twitter... and after going through some basic diagnostic steps (turn off/on... reset the bluetooth cache...)... which I had already done (but I do understand, you have to hit the low hanging fruit first for the non-techies...), their solution on both channels were; Just use the headphone jack or to buy a new one with a 50 euro discount (considering that they retail at around 300 euro... this isn't really a great option either...). Anyway, neither of them budged with the fact that it was a known problem, and not a hardware issue but a self-inflicted firmware issue. Of course, it didn't help that I was just outside the one year warranty window that was offered by the manufacturer (but that doesn't matter in the EU, they have a mandatory 2 year (?) responsibility...).... plus they started to say that they had run out of stock anyway (there was a new version in the market...).

So, I was pretty much resigned to having a wired set of headphones... but as a last ditch effort, I emailed the local Bose office. I explained the problem in the same way... headphones were great, but a firmware update had basically rendered the device useless for it's intended purpose... it was a known problem, and I was covered under the EU rules.... and they replied... no problem, they would arrange for collection... and if the headphones were found to have the problem that I stated, they would replace it immediately with the newer Mark 2 version for no cost (no shipping cost either!). WOW!

So let's just say that I'm a very very happy Bose customer (probably helps that they have some solid competition in this part of the headphone space now...)... and I have to remember the lesson that the most easy points of contact (FB/Twitter) for customer service might not be the ones that are authorised to do more than to follow their assigned scripts. If you want real action, you might have to go hunting just that little bit further! However, it is definitely worth it when it is a piece of electronics that both costs a fair bit, and that you are particularly attached to!