Oculus Support Woes

Long time lurker here sharing some frustrations. I actually had to make an account to share my story. I bought a unit from Best Buy on 5/28. A couple of weeks later, it died. The screen went black while every other component seemed to work (tracking/audio). After some DIY troubleshooting using the oculus support pages I ran out of options. When left with no other choice, I spent longer than I should have trying to find a support email in the first place.

After several days (!) of going back and forth, the support team determined that they would need to replace my HDMI cable. "Great", I can just wait for that I thought. Should be no problem, right? 4 days later I receive another email from support updating me that they were going to send me a new unit altogether. Odd! Okay, well, at least this should definitely fix it! Now, it's been four days again and no response. This has been pretty common since the conversation has started and from what I've read elsewhere other people have said the same thing: support sucks.

Here is the most recent email from support:

Hello there,

Thanks for your patience while I reviewed this case for you.

We really appreciate all the information you've provided for us, this is extremely important for the >RMA process.

Based on the information you've detailed, we'd like to provide you with a complete replacement unit.

We'll prepare a prepaid label for you to send your device back to our warehouse.

Once it arrives at our warehouse, the replacement process will be initiated.

My team and I will be in touch once we have processed the return label.

Thank you.

Constantine Oculus Support

After this much waiting (4 days) I responded with this:

First off, I'd like to say this complaint isn't necessarily directed towards any of the staff that I've >communicated with. I know that their responses are canned and approved messages. Their >politeness is not in question. However, I'd like this message passed on to a supervisor.

It's disappointing at best to find out that Oculus clearly did not have a support plan in place. What >support plan you do have is clearly lacking. Any of the troubleshooting steps provided in this email >should have been found on the website; instead, I had to waste days going back and forth with >support with information they're copying and pasting from email to email.

It's appropriate for the customer service team members to set my expectations every step of the >way; instead I'm left wondering if any one is working on this problem at all. I cannot fathom how >Oculus' support team is unable to immediately send off a return label. This shouldn't require 4 days >(at this point) only to hear nothing again. How long will I wait before I'm told I'm getting a shipping >label? 5 days? 7 days? Is anyone even working on it? Once I get the return label, how long will the >next steps take? If the CV2 is launched before my unit is shipped, will I get the new unit? The delay >here is absurd.

Oculus should offer to send me a new unit immediately while placing a hold on my credit card and >giving me 30 days for your team to receive the old unit (after the shipping label is sent to me) >before charging me for the new unit. This is pretty standard operating procedure for any similar >item. I have the unfortunate "luck" to frequently be on the receiving end of problems like this with >other companies. I could tell you from past experiences if this were an Xbox One their team would >have had this issue resolved in less than a week (start to finish).

Clearly I'm frustrated with the lack of information provided by support. Having worked retail previously for years and currently working at a company that supplies call center services this entire interaction grinds my gears. Yes, the staff is polite. However, it's clear to me (and I could be wrong) that the support team is just using templates for the bulk of their emails (ironically, the email I provided not withstanding). This indicates that their templates, and therefore management, never considered any of my concerns important when drafting the scripts for their call center. No one at Oculus once considered, "Hey, this process is going to take a while. Should we tell them this?" And further down that path, no one thought, "Hey, this process is god awful archaic. How can we improve this?"

In hindsight, I should have taken it back to Best Buy immediately instead of reaching out to Oculus. That was a mistake, but I avoided my better judgement because of the distance I am from the store.