Credit where credit is due: Sony Customer Service

Way too often, forums are a venting ground for when a big corporation's customer service department screws us over. So for this one time when that didn't happen, I thought I'd post about it. Sony's customer support actually did very well this time around.

Astonishing, I know. I'm not sure I'm over the shock just yet.

This is what happened:

For my birthday back in February this year, my extremely sexy husband gave me a Sony eReader, a PRS-950. I love the thing. I may have an addiction to it. There's millions and millions of indie books out on the internet and I can read them all on a device that weighs just a few ounces and fits in my purse. For a compulsive book lover like me, that's pure heaven. Or rather, it is heaven as long as the blasted thing actually works...

See, it sort of stopped working. Or rather, the buttons stopped working. Options and Home had several seconds' delay when I pressed them, and sometimes when I pressed Home the 950 would act as if I pressed Size and offer to re-do the font size on the page for me instead of going to the Home screen. The page turn buttons no longer turned the pages of an eBook (a major obstacle when trying to read said eBook), but instead brought up the PDF zoom over-lay. Swiping on the touchscreen turned the page only 50% of the time, and at random.

I did a soft reset of my reader, which means pressing the reset button. That made it act normal again for a few minutes, then the weirdness returned. To make it even more fun to use the thing, the 950 stopped remembering which page I was at in the book I was reading, so if I was at page 55, and opened the book again, it started at page one. And since turning pages didn't really work... simply put, the 950 was no longer usable.

During slow moments and downtime at work I started to prowl Sony's support website, to find out how to file a warranty claim. The 950 comes with a year-long warranty, and since I hadn't had it for a year yet, I figured I might as well see what it takes to have it replaced. Having dealt with Sony's customer service in the past I was less than enthusiastic, but I'm not about to purchase a replacement at their outrageous prices if I can get a warranty exchange. During my research I found a link to "chat with an agent", so I clicked on it, and it opened a chat with a Sony support agent. He was polite and actually tried to be helpful, so I described the button problem, and that a soft reset didn't fix it. The chat agent said the reader would need to be sent in for exchange/repair since it is showing every sign of having a hardware problem, and then he gave me a phone number to call, since you can only use the form on the website if you still have your receipt.

I called the phone number the chat agent gave me after I got home from work on Tuesday evening. The person that took my call was able to find the chat transcript by using my email address, and he said that if I was willing to give him a credit card for security they would send me a replacement right away. Remembering the information security issues Sony have been through recently I hesitated for a moment, but then I remembered that my bank is keeping an extra-paranoid fraud watch on my credit card since that pick-pocket accident in Spain, so I agreed and gave him the card information.

The replacement reader arrived Thursday afternoon. They sent it with next-day delivery. It has a sticker that says "refurbished" (the phone agent told me it would be a reconditioned unit, so I knew about that) but it looks brand new, as if it was returned unused by a customer that changed their mind--their loss! There was also a FedEx shipping label in the box next to the replacement reader, and a card with a "we're very sorry that your product required service, please let us send you a survey a week from now on how we handled this issue"-message. The broken 950 has now been dropped off at the FedEx store next to work, and the replacement is working beautifully, better than the broken one did for the last few months I had it. Reloading my entire eBook library to the replacement 950 was ridiculously easy. All I had to do was plug it in, log in to my Sony Reader Store account and click on "authorize new device" and I was all set.

I have no choice but to revise my very negative opinion about Sony's customer service, after how smoothly they took care of this. This entire experience was surprisingly smooth and hassle-free.