[jsiepkes]

What I did once is lookup the financial report of the company, find all the board members and C level execs l, figured out what their email structure looks like ([e-mail]) and just walked them through my support experience. Then I asked if replacing the HEPA filter in my 5 year old vacuum cleaner should cost 250 Euro, which was more expensive than the vacuum cleaner at the time.

[hypercube33]

I did something similar after sitting two days on the phone trying to get support for backup exec. this was a million years ago and I ended up looping through everyone there. they offshored support and no one could help me but not because they didn't try.

I documented everything and my frustrations with their software not working or supporting modern operating systems and sent it over to people who seemed high up - email, twitter or reddit.

later got a call asking if they could show it to the board because as employees they had the same frustrations and I said sure. next day they announced that their president was fired...

Good ol backup exec - if it errored it was working and no errors meant nothing ran.

[ilamont]

What was the response?

[jsiepkes]

I got a call from the country service manager. Telling me I caused quite a ruckus. They offered to sell me the part for something like 75 Euro's or something I believe. Which was still an outrageous amount of money for a HEPA filter. But I agreed since this was probably as good as it was going to get. Now it is true that there are laws regarding reasonable pricing of replacement and spareparts in the Netherlands I might have been able to base a lawsuit on. But I didn't really feel like going to court over 250 Euro (or really 75 Euro with the new offer) with a multi billion dollar company...

The issue was that their line of thought was; Well according to Dutch standards a vacuum cleaner has a life expectancy of 5 years. So if you want to replace something in it after 5 years (even if it is a customer replaceable part like a HEPA filter), it's not a replacement part / consumable, it's a spare part (which are usually more expansive). Which is also why I asked them; "Does that mean it is the official stance that you shouldn't expect your vacuum cleaners to last much longer then 5 years? Because that HEPA filter certainly needs replacement after 5 years.". Obviously they never answered that.

BTW We are talking about a premium house hold appliance brand here. The vacuum cleaner now costs well over 500 Euro. But when I bought it, it was about 240 Euro's or something. Sells for 700 dollars at Walmart it seems.

[ilamont]

Thank you for responding. Sometimes it is absolutely necessary to bypass standard “customer service“ channels to get results.

[Xiol]

Sometimes we're just after the catharsis.

[pegasus]

Nobody likes to be left hanging.

[moribvndvs]

Currently looking up emails for jsiepkes’ board to walk them through my frustrating experience with their comment.

[Legend2440]

If they had responded, he would have mentioned it in his comment.