Customer experience - holiday period - issues and grievances

[edit: Since i've writtent this post, an ongoing conversation between myself and the representatives of XMG has taken place. Questions were answered and overall, my experience with this reseller is quite good. in fact... i've been impressed on a number of occasions. ]

I'll spare you my life story. Sufficed to say that I have been looking forward to buying the highest-ranking laptop in terms of performance for nearly 4 years.
It's been a difficult 4 years as far as financial stability and unforeseen family issues were concerned.

At the beginning of 2016, I had begun considering a P870 SLI laptop. The forums and review sites I've checked repeatedly referenced XMG as being a reputable provider of top-notch hardware performance and quality.
I have followed their laptop reviews throughout this time.

At one point in 2017 I had decided on buying one of their laptops. This was relatively late, and as a consequence, it happened that the new CoffeeLake processors were about to become available.
I had decided to wait until XMG released their upcoming Zenith 17 models which boasted these hardware components.

Order placed on the 4th of December 2016, received confirmation immediately, also received acknoledgement and confirmation of payment on behalf of MYSN within the next 3 days. Components were in stock... as far as their website claimed.

Failing to see any update related to the "Order received by MYSN" header present on my order, I had attempted contact with the MYSN customer service repeatedly. I had assumed that they processed the order during that time, and there was an issue with the tracking number.

On the 7th of December, I sent an email.

I had spent around 45 minutes ( cumulatively ) waiting for one of their representatives to pick up the phone. The robot service was kind enough to repeadedly remind me of the fact that I was in position 1. ... every single time i called ... I WAS IN POSITION 1.

After hearing the " we kindly advise you to call back later " statement the robot made the 10th time, i decided to try and make contact in a different way.

[edit: the following point was a miss-understanding which resulted from a series of coincidences.]

XMG has an IRC channel for support. Apparently it's not for non-german customers. I know this becuase one of the moderators was kind enough to kick me out every single time i've asked a question in english.
When I threatened to cancel my order if i would be kicked out again, he was kind enough to point out the fact that i was the one who was at fault seeing as though i was not using the right language.

Throughout the following days I had called mysn repeatedly over the phone. No answer.

On the 12th of December, I had received the reply to my email, detailing the fact that the laptop was stuck in a freight airport's backlog due to the fact that the airport staff have held a strike. XMG notified me of the fact that the laptop had not reached them, and as such they were waiting for it as well in order to begin customization.
This was fortunate as I was minutes away from submitting my order cancellation form.

On the 28th of December, the status finally changed and I was notified that the order had begun production. ... 1 day before the mandatory holiday periods. I did have some hope that that order will be processed and I'd receive the laptop by now... but it gets better.

On January 5th 2018, I have once again attempted to make contact... I even used this forum. @XMG can testify to that.

I've spent yet another quarter of an hour being reminded of the fact that i was first in line to receive attention, yet this time it actually worked. One of their representatives had handled my request to check the status of my order.

The following day I received an email detailing the fact that the laptop does not meet acceptance requriements ... and a replacement is due to arrive at XMG premises on the 30th ... this month.

I am currently awaiting a reply to a couple of emails in which i've requested some additional information related to the phone conversation, as well as the aforementioned email.

Today is the 9th.

... now this may seem like i'm complaining ... because I am... it's meant to be a constructive review.

@XMG,

Here are a few things which should / could be implemented relatively easy as well as why:

1. Regarding the " you are currently in position 1. your call is important to us... etc. ": Either this is an error in your system, whereas the robot cannot get the actual size of the queue of people waiting for customer service.... or it winds up leaving me and possibly other people with the sense of being insulted seeing as though the money we've spent on our products is not enough to warrant propper customer service.

2. Regarding unforeseen circumstances: I understand that what this particular order of mine is going through is nothing short of a gipsy curse... (the airport strike + holiday period + the QA non-compliance). I appreciate the fact that there is an emphasis on quality ... but having to personally request this kind of information and being notified of a delay spanning a month ... especially considering the sizeable investment i'm making is NOT OK. Please prioritise notifications such as these in the future.

3. More detailed information such as " Order in production. Unforeseen issue : There is an issue with your configuration - we've received parts from Clevo which do not satisfy our QA policy " in the mysn customer page - when checking out our order staus would be wonderful. Seeing progress is always beneficial, and some customers including myself would appreciate being "kept in the loop".

[edit: the following point was a miss-understanding which resulted from a series of coincidences.]

4. Me having to threaten the fact that I will cancel my order should not be the only reason for which the moderator of the IRC channel gives me answers. Even if those answers are essentially " this IRC channel is no longer used by XMG personnel. ". Getting kicked off without any explanation rather than " this channel is for germans only " (or something similar) feels insulting.



I will update this post based on my experience with this reseller.

 

Hi

This is just a placeholder - I have asked my colleagues in sales to look I to these points but as the only information I have right now is that pm on Friday I need to wait for the order and communication details tomorrow.

I do know that we had a huge problem with a large P870 (Zenith) chassis shipment which was stuck in customz, that affected lots of orders - but as this should have been communicated to everyone I need to find out what happened.

Appreciate your patience until I can reply in more depth.

 

Hello,

Just to clarify:

I'm not complaining about the quality of the customer service I've received. My questions were answered thoroughly and correctly.
I'm not complaining about having to wait longer for the laptop. As far as I'm concerned, I'm paying for quality and the extension to the 30th this month is a consequence of that.

I'm complaining about the fact that as far as my experience has went so far, it's been difficult to get a hold of this information... or it at least feels that way.
Moreover, some of the things which have happened ( i'm not talking about the strike + QA non-compliance ) have made me question the quality of service so much so that on a number of occasions I have been seriously considering cancelling that order. ( It didn't help either that I searched for "XMG customer experience" and the first post i came across ... the reason for which this account on this website exists in fact ... is made by a guy complaining about having a screw loose. . I'm making an effort not to sound like that guy and provide some sort of constructive feedback. )

I'm sure you can see why this is relatively dangerous for your business model.

Adressing some of these issues may lead to fewer order cancellations.
For example, if in the customer page I would have read something along the lines of " Please expect delays - reason: we have not yet received your laptop yet because of an airport strike in Frankfurt " or any other custom message such as this, I would not have bothered calling at all ... nor writing these posts.

B.

 

Understand completely from what you posted the first time. There has admittedly been a lack of pro-active updates with regard to your delays, it's solely the fault of our company and I will echo my colleague's appology to you.

If this is the post I think you're refering to from 2013, this was actually a problem with the screw itself and not that it wasn't tightened (it functioned fine, but where the screw should perhaps have been replaced as the head wasn't milled properly in the factory - it wasn't burred by our engineers during the build). But we shouldn't get into that again - it was an extremely complex case with lots of other factors to take into account which I didn't post at the time.

I know that you're not fixating on this, but I would try and look at things in a different way. How many negative comments and posts do you see on this forum from XMG customers - not to blow our own trumpet, but considering we sell a huge amount more laptops to customers in Europe compared to anyone else on the forum, we have an extremely low percentage of negative feedback. Granted, we don't have a wealth of positive feedback posts here, but in general that's how things have always been for European companies on nbr and bad feedback tends to outweigh goods feedback.


Regarding the Zenith 17, we had a big problem in December with our air freight delivery from Clevo - this went through Frankfurt airport and they had a huge cargo staff strike in November which ran over into December - just one of many news articles https://resilience360.com/news/back...last-weeks-following-multiple-strike-actions/ . This mainly affected the Zenith 17, we had lots of orders over the period and in general it looks like the situation was managed reasonably well with regard to organising and communicating with customers who had the Zenith 17 on order. Of course this had a roll on effect, in that the laptop was selling out all the time, so for the delivery at the end of December this was fully booked and the website reflects the stock level at all points to make sure customers understand the lead time. There are always exceptions, and in a couple of instances including @EverNight the delay information wasn't communicated in enough of a pro-active manner - we can only appologise for this in what was a difficult situation for our staff to manage in the busiest time of the year for both sales and support.

This report is correct, production was working overtime between Christmas and the New Year in order to ship as many systems as possible (of all laptop and PC orders, plus the other business we do) and unfortunately the problem that showed up in testing was too late to rectify with a chassis swap. The replacement chassis isn't a single unit, it's part of the next delivery we have from Clevo (by air, not ship or train) so that we can have the stock sooner which should be with us at the end of the month - as the website states.

Our sales/support department has asked me to thank you for bringing this to our attention. They are checking the system to make sure that everything is running correctly and if anything looks like it might be causing a loop or similar problem.

To be honest, we value every customer the same no matter the value of the order - to do so otherwise wouldn't be right. But I understand your point completely and as you pointed out your case has been thorugh particularly numerous issues which weren't in our control. As I stated above in the top of this post, having more proactive updates is something that the sales and support team will definitely take on board for the future. It by no means happens all the time, or our reputation would of course be dirt - we're shipping thousands of builds per month and so when it does happen we accept the issue, admit to the problem and try to impliment changes and improvements in order to minimise the potential that the same problems occur in the future.

I'll reply to this in individual points to try and clarify the situation here:

- the IRC channel was used in the past (several years ago) as Live Chat support which was manned by some of our staff
- it hasn't been manned as Live Chat, by our staff, for well over a year and there's a note in the channel in red which states "kein Live-Support, bitte Telefon, info@ oder support@ (mysn.de) nutzen (EN: no live support use phone/mail, see mysn.eu)"
- It isn't linked to from our website, so I'm not sure how you managed to find it! If you saw a link on the website which we have overlooked could you please pm me the location?
- It is still used by some members of the public as a chat room, I don't know if there is actually an official moderator or who that is. But regardless of this, I can see how you may have felt insulted if someone told you that the channel was only for german language - this is definitely NOT the position of our company and wouldn't have been communicated by anyone officially connected to the company
- if you threatened to cancel the order, I don't know what support the "moderator" could have given you if he/she did then communicate with you. They wouldn't have had any access to company information, you or your order details.

At the moment, stock is due back in at the end of this month. Of course your build will be prioritised as it will be first in the order date queue - once stock arrives you'll receive an update and then we can get the laptop out to you.

Once again, the feedback you have provided is very valuable to us. Without this, we don't always know what needs improving and what system changes or improvements should be made. But I would also like to reiterate that your experience has been severely affected by the external factors that I have detailed in this post. I don't find it acceptable, nor do my colleagues and there are several matters which in your case could ahd should definitely have been handled better - especially quicker and more proactively.

If you want to discuss anything further, or specific to your order, could you please pm me so that we can share order details and other information?

 

I understand. Thinking about it, I do remember that the channel's moderator mention the fact that it was no longer used by XMG.

Essentially, the only reasons for witch I had assumed that there was any connection to this is because that IRC channel component was embedded in the web page, as well as the channel's name simmilarity.

It most likely was pure coincidence that he replied right after what i wrote at that time. ( i did not mention any customer/order information )

I believe so. I've read through his post and my personal opinion is that the guy actually has a screw loose. I know he's had different technical issues... but still... i'm not taking back my screw-loose joke.

I know. And I agree with this point of view.

If anyone else reads this, I want them to know that as I'm writing this post, someone at XMG is working on their website in order to fix the dead link that allows access to the no-longer-used IRC channel. I mean... i sent them a PM with the dead link and I could see that someone's working on it. I'm quite impressed.

Additionally, I admit that the initial review's tone was affected by my mood subjectively after receiving the delivery extension notification. I did write it in a negative tone.
I'm glad it's been handled constructively and that it was of use to that end.

I will edit the original post accordingly sometime today in order to clarify some things for first-time readers.

Lastly, @XMG, Thank you for your replies and interest in this post.