The following is a personal story and involves my May through June 2003 problems with getting a brand new but non-functioning product replaced by its manufacturer. It contains opinions and the truth. If you are the lawyers for Philips, you have no gripe with me whatsoever. If you have similar experiences with Philips customer service I would love to hear from you.

Back in March of 2003, my birthday present was a Philips DVDR985 DVD recorder.

It is everything I could have asked for in a video recorder: the ability to record as easily as with a VCR but in DVD quality. I can record between 1 hour (highest quality) and up to 6 hours on a single DVD+R blank.

The recorder was so good that in early May I purchased another one. The first one is connected to our TiVo in the family room and the new one went upstairs to connect to the TiVo in our bedroom. For the first two weeks it worked like a champ.

Then, it suddenly started killing DVDs by erroring out in the middle of recording or while creating its menu or during finalization.

I went out to the Philips USA website and found their "online chat with a technician" page. Over a period of six days I chatted with three different techs, went through at least three procedures to troubleshoot the issue, and killed another half dozen DVD blanks. The final verdict, the laser and tracking component was probably bad and the entire unit would need to be replaced. How long, I asked? About 10-14 days.

So, I called their local service center and explained the problems and told the story to that point. The guy I spoke with agreed that it sounded like a whole unit replacement, and if I would bring the old one in they would get the new one ordered and it would be delivered to my house in about 10-14 days.

So I did. And the following day I got a call from the service center telling me that the unit was going to be replaced and that I would be able to pick it up at the service center in about two weeks.

Ignoring the difference between "sent to your house" and "pick it up at the center" I sat back and waited.

Two weeks later I tried calling the service center for an update and estimate on when the new unit would arrive. The call got switched to a call center where the woman told me that she couldn't look up the status of my replacement, but it looked like the replacement hadn't been ordered until about a week after I took the unit in, and that it would be "maybe another three weeks or so before it was shipped to me" and that it would be coming across the country by ground delivery (with perhaps another week added to the process). I wasn't pleased, told her so, and she told me to call Customer Care for more information.

I did. They told me that they couldn't tell me anything and that I would have to call the service center. I explained that I had and had been told to call Customer Care by the service center. She said that she couldn't help. I asked to be escalated to a supervisor. She then offered that she would place a call to the people in charge of making replacements and call me back "before 2:30 today." It was 11:00 am.

Guess who never called? The following day I called Customer Care, again. I went through the story with a new CS rep who told me that he couldn't help me, that I should call the service center. I told him how tired I was of hearing that and asked to be escalated to a supervisor. Four minutes later a woman came on the line. I asked if she was a supervisor and she said that the call had been escalated to her. I asked, again, if she was a supervisor and she said that she could take care of me.

She couldn't, told me to call the service center, and in general didn't seem to really care at all, so I insisted on being escalated to the manager. He came on. I asked if the woman I had just spoken with was a supervisor and he said that they had two people by that name so he wasn't sure.

????

I gave him the entire story including my belief that his Customer Care people didn't "care" at all, that they were the most unhelpful group I had ever dealt with, and told him that I did know a bit about customer service since my wife had been the manager of Customer Service for Apple Computer for a couple years. He told me that he couldn't do anything about the lack of follow through by the first woman since he hadn't been involved until now, but he would "send a message" to the people responsible for replacements and request information. I told him that wasn't enough; that I wanted someone from that orgaization to call me later that day with information or at least to have their number so I could follow up. Of course he "was in no position" to give out that information. He did suggest that he would ask for the replacement to be expedited. I asked if that meant that I still had to wait the week for ground shipping. He wasn;t sure but said he would suggest overnight shipping.

Over the next 5 days he and I had a couple other conversations. He wasn't happy to hear from me and I wasn't happy with his lack of assistance. I don't think we will ever be friends.

I wrote a letter of complaint (4 pages) with the entire story to the Director of Customer Service naming names and dates and the like. No response so far (two weeks later), but I did finally get a replacement unit. It arrived 23 days after I took my 3-week old new unit in for replacement. It was evidently shipped (ground) the day before I first spoke to the first Customer Care woman. But nobody could look that up. All of my complaints and hours on the phone had been unnecessary.

Thankfully it works fine or I would be going through all this again.

I've abbreviated the story, above, since each of the phone conversations lasted between 10 minutes and 1 1/2 hours. These are the most aggravating, unprofessional group of customer service people I have ever dealt with. And the entire system at Philips is screwed up something fierce; no group seems to be able to contact another directly... they have to go through a central "system" to request action. They can't give you any details about the status of a service or replacement and their management is unresponsive to complaints.

Bad Philips!

Now I am not saying that their products are bad. I still love my DVD recorders. And, I love my Philips brand TiVo DVRs.

I just pray that I never have to dal with their service center or Philips Customer Care ever again.

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