| Same experience over the past couple years. It's also weird to me, for example I bought six items from Leatherman (some multitools plus accessories) and one of them showed up with some damage. No worries, Leatherman supports their product with a 25 year warranty so I just mail it back for a repair. There was a whole saga about Leatherman refusing via email and my bank charging back for the entire order (I asked for just the tool that Leatherman refused to repair, the bank was "Nah, we're just gonna do it all, we have an email where the merchant refused to honor a warranty, they have no leverage.") It's bizarre to me, because a relatively minor repair had to be cheaper than giving me three multitools and six accessories for negative dollars (since the bank tosses fees on top of the chargeback). The companies have no incentive and know they're going to lose (see all the articles complaining about 'friendly fraud' to reference chargebacks) yet they do it. Perhaps they over index on being paranoid that the customer wants to defraud them via chargeback, which in turn increases the odds a chargeback happens since the disgruntled customer feels they were ripped off? |
From where I'm sitting (business owner who handles my own customer support), this seems like a classic case of the business's incentives not aligning with the employee's.
Minor complaints are often much harder to deal with (and care about) than major ones, and far more likely to explode into something nasty. Couple that with the fact that the support rep doesn't see a cent of that transaction, and I can see why they would want to shut down the interaction ASAP.