Bad service from Fairphone?

I got problems with my FP2 from the day I got it - in the beginning of this year. In the beginning just low battery problems, then randomly turn-off and since June it has not worked at all - black screen - and I have tried to take out the battery and the sim card and put it in again. Nothing helps.
I have sent emails, but wait months for reply. They ask me to be patient. The 8th June I asked to get my money back, but I haven’t heard from Fairphone yet. What can I do? Any suggestions? Have other people had the same problems with the service?

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Yes, customer support is terribly slow. It shows up frequently as an issue on the forum. There’s a summary of just about all we know about that here:

P.S. I’ve moved the topic from Meta, as it’s not a discussion about the forum. In #fairphone2help you may also get some help from others fixing the problem.

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Read up here to get a slight idea of what the support is currently up to, for you then might understand a little bit better, why you didn’t receive any answer soon enough:

https://www.fairphone.com/2016/08/04/were-sorry-to-keep-you-waiting-an-update-from-customer-support/

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Thanks to your post I saw after 7 months first time that FP hires new personal for support team. 5 new persons means almost 40%! If it was only for urgent-customer-repair cases no more annoyed customers are possible! For the first time in 2016(!). However I am not sure that problems are solved for support itself because the new support members need to be introduced to work for maybe longer time. They have been announced also for longer time. One question to support leader would be: Why couldnot it be done earlier ?

BUT … I was stunned that the support team also organizes the support pages, filling them of course, makes video tutorials, doing even administrative tasks and … and …and. What looks obvious at first became a disadvantage for really urgent and annoyed customers. Other workers, even engineers maybe could have helped support in the past and also today e.g. by making video tutorials and others. Also a small company (CEO) should have known better. The support is the flagship embodiment for every company and its products. No, also while backlog was not that critical for longer time e.g. even in the beginning of the year this was not a neglectable veniality or just an underestimation because the modularity of a revolutionary design could have expected massive impact on the support.

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You are right. They have done a big mistake by not hiring new support members. Maybe they hoped that the number of support requests will decrease over time.

I hope that they learned their lesson and have a faster support in the future.

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Of course, two device types and almost twice as many devices in the market means more tickets by tickets by nature. But the ticket the ticket increase was irrationally high since they introduced the FP2 to their customers.

I can see only two possibilities why they didn’t take action much earlier:
Either, they didn’t foresee this and thought they could handle the increasing number of tickets until they finally realized that there’s more behind it than just 40k more devices.

Or, they did foresee it, but hoped to be able to handle it anyways. In that case, not smart.

In either case, what can we learn from that?

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At another thread in the forum I guessed that 2 reasons come to my mind about this kind of stubbornness only by the management of FP that are responsible to this .

  1. The FP2 was designed not only to open by customers but also for self repair. The modularity also should have decreased repair issues by exchanging rather modules than a complete device. Now questions arise again about it.
  2. It has been said often and repeated to many here suffering from “common-issues” e.g. shorter battery cycles
    The FP2 has an expense or draw back not only on the price at purchase time due to several new concepts:
    a) the fair traded ressources, the longvitey also means a different business model. And all this for a very small company . Of course has this impact on the price. Nobody ever here blamed FP to make money of profit from this.
    b) Because customers cannot expect a high class model as the price even made some customers still expect
    everybody knows there is a deduction of expectation and even sacrifice or abandonment to high class features.
    c) conclusion: If customers has to renounce on comfort like other high class device then it was only a small step to lower quality of material and subsequently customer support.
    d) Personally I am not sure if the hype to a “fair phone” and positive high expectation that can be found not only at this forum was kind of abused. But the FP management was sure that their customers do have a higher willingness to suffer from restriction on their device. However it shows to me clearly that customer support was a hidden expense.

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