Customer Support with the X Factor (Microsoft Xbox 360 customer support)

Member Name: collingwood21

Product:	Microsoft Xbox 360 customer support
Date:	18/06/09 (259 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free helpline, Easy to navigate website, Very quick turnaround on repairs, Good communication

Disadvantages: Some mixed messages in the emails sent to us, The first repair request didn't work properly

For some time now it has been clear that there is something rather wrong with the Xbox 360 console. Many owners have complained of hardware issues and defects, and have moved on to their second, third and even fourth console as the machine seems to breaks down with alarming regularity; given that the 360 has only been around since late 2005 (or early 2006 if you happen to be reading this in Australia, New Zealand or parts of the Far East) it means an awful lot of kit failing before it is four years old. Indeed, as consumer electronics go, this console has a remarkably high failure rate, with warranty company Squaretrade reporting a defect rate of 16% on the 1,000 consoles it surveyed. If you are thinking that doesn't sound too high, compare it to a rate of just 3% for the Nintendo Wii and Sony PS3 when surveyed in the same way, and around 6-8% for four year old TVs (although in the interests of fairness I will mention that 43% of four year old laptops are also expected to fail). Of these failures, around 60% have been caused by what has become known as "the red ring of death", so called because the cheerful green circle of lights that glow on the front of your machine suddenly turn to three red flashing lights (accompanied by your game abruptly vanishing from the screen) when this fault occurs. The cause of this is overheating, which ultimately burns out the motherboard; in Microsoft's rush to get its console on the market and start competing with its rivals, it appears that it allowed less-than-premium manufacturing and unreliable materials to sneak into its product. This "general hardware failure" (as Microsoft like to call it) has proved to be so prevalent that in July 2007 the Vice President of Microsoft's interactive entertainment division announced that the standard 1 year warranty that came with the console would be extended to three years to cover any console that has the three flashing red lights on it, and $1 billion has been pledged by the company to sort out this problem.

This money unfortunately came too late to stop us from experiencing this widely complained about consumer issue for ourselves. We had an Xbox 360 Elite, a newer variant of the console that was released in spring 2007 (and bought by us second hand from a friend for a significant discount in autumn 2007 after he found he didn't use it a great deal after all - oh, the advantages of having spendthrift mates to take advantage of!). The Elite version of the console was supposed to be less subject to these problems than the original batch of Xbox 360s; with a chip that allegedly consumed less power and an added heat sink to help prevent overheating, these claims sounded good on paper, although there are as yet no figures to back them up. Still, extra heat sink or no extra heat sink, our console seized up one evening last May and refused to come back to life again after we got the dreaded "red ring of death". The machine had been in perfect working order prior to this, and had survived nearly 18 months of regular gaming with no problems other than the odd game crash that we have come to expect from whatever gaming system or PC we use. This is where our experience with the Xbox 360 customer support service began, and given our previous poor experiences with anything that involved the words "customer support", "customer service" or "warranty", we didn't exactly have high hopes of resolving our problem easily.


First Contact - The Xbox Customer Support Website
========================================
Heading to the Xbox customer support website (http://support.xbox.com/support) was the logical first step for us, and we found a site that was clearly designed and easy to use, with a nice prominent link to what to do if you experience the three flashing red lights on your console (although it can sometimes be frustratingly slow to access, presumably because so many people experience this issue). Clicking on this link took us to a troubleshooting guide with nice helpful pictures (http://support.xbox.com/support/en/us/nxe/ hardware/default.aspx) to help users identify the cause of the red lights, first asking us to check our power supply for a warning light that would indicate it has failed (there was none) and then trying the magic bullet of turning the console off, let it cool down, and then turning it on again to see if this brought it back to life (it didn't). With these two possibilities discounted, it was clear that the machine would need to be either repaired or replaced. At this stage we had some concerns that having bought the console second-hand we would be ineligible for the extended warranty scheme that covers this fault, but thankfully spendthrift mate had also been organised enough to keep all the machine's original paperwork, and insufficiently bothered about warranties to not have registered the Xbox under his name before he sold it on to us. The result was that the website happily accepted our registration (a straightforward form completion exercise giving our name and contact details) and worked out from the serial number that we were within the three year deadline after purchase and therefore able to have our console repaired by Microsoft under the warranty (fortunately bypassing the need to produce receipts to prove the purchase date). Breathing a sigh of relief, the next step was therefore to file a repair request with Microsoft so we could get this process under way.


How to Mend a Broken Xbox
======================
There are two methods to register your Xbox as needing a repair: online or over the phone. Having found the website easy to use thus far, we selected the online option (there is another nice clear link to "console repair" on the support website home page) and completed the form to start the process off. This was sent off successfully and with relative ease, and we were told to await a prepaid postage label from UPS that would allow us to send our console to the European repair centre without any cost to us (which is just as well, given the repair centre is in Frankfurt). The confirmation email we received shortly afterwards caused us some confusion - it said both that we would have to provide our own packaging materials and that packaging materials would be sent to us - and we encountered further problems when the email from UPS, received the following morning, contained a link to our label that didn't work. This therefore gave us reason to find out what the phone service was like, and the answer is that Xbox's customer support line is surprisingly, well, supportive. For a start it is a free 0800 number, and it is open from 9am to 10pm Monday to Friday, 9am to 8pm on Saturdays and 9am to 5pm on Sundays, which are pretty generous hours for any customer services to have. After a mercifully short spell being held in a queue, we were told that the only way to get UPS to send us another label email was unfortunately to delete and re-register the repair job, but the member of staff we spoke to was polite, knowledgeable and helpful, and this was done quickly and without fuss - and he settled the question over the packaging materials (we would need to provide them, but we shouldn't use the original console box for security reasons).

The following day we received UPS email number two, and this time the process worked smoothly - the link took us to our personalised label, which we simply printed out and taped onto our packaged Xbox (fortunately I am the sort of person who saves bubble wrap and cardboard packaging with a mind to reusing them on other parcels). At this stage customers are expected to contact UPS to arrange collection of their package, but as courier companies don't believe in evenings and weekends, it was easier for us simply to drop the parcel off at a local depot. It was now simply a matter of waiting to see what happened.

Four days after we posted the Xbox, we received an email from the customer support service acknowledging the safe arrival of it at the repair centre. This was a pleasant surprise, and I always appreciate it when companies take the trouble to communicate well with their customers and keep us informed about what is happening. Better still, just two days after the Xbox arrived at the repair centre, we got another email to say that the machine had been repaired and it was being dispatched back to us. The customer support service also appeared to communicate well with UPS, as they contacted us shortly afterwards to give an estimated delivery date. The return of our Xbox took six days, but as this included a bank holiday weekend I can hardly complain; the machine not only was delivered on the date given by UPS, but they managed to leave it safely with our neighbours and leave a calling card saying they had done so (two simple things a lot of couriers struggle to achieve in my experience). In total there were just 15 days between first logging a repair request online and getting our repaired console back, a quite impressive turn around in my book.


Concluding Thoughts
================
While the overheating problem on the Xbox 360 is seriously annoying and remains to be properly resolved, at least Microsoft are taking the problem seriously and trying to help customers resolve the problem quickly. I found the customer support service to be far better than I expected, and I was pleased that they used a reliable courier service as well, as we all know just how bad some of UPS's competitors can be. In particular I was pleased that the service kept in touch with us through the whole process so we felt well informed about the progress of the repair and what would happen next - although they could do with clearing up the confusion about the packaging in the confirmation email, I think. All in all a pretty impressive service, although I hope to never have to use it again!

Recommended - if you are unlucky enough to have problems with your Xbox.

Summary: Support for Xbox customers is much better than I expected!