Fairphone really has to sort out its warranty support

Unfortunately I cannot call as my phone is broken.

2 Likes

I’m sure you know someone who owns a working phone and would lend it to you for such an important call.

Sorry, to be honest I did not read your whole post. I do think that as @paulakreuzer said you could find someone with a working phone. It’s not as if you were completely out of options, IMO. :slight_smile:

1 Like

(or try speaker phone mode - uses a different mic)

5 Likes

Also it is expensive to call unless you live in the Netherlands.

I agree with everything you say as am living with a similar experience. Had been a big FP fan, with a FP1, but since buying a FP2 refurbished my loyalty and confidence in the company has taken a big nosedive. Experience long delays in getting a reply to any message. My main problem has been terrible battery life but although this has at last been acknowledged the replacement battery is no better!! Apparently it might improve if I let it drain completely a few times. It’s hardly reassuring. I have paid 450-550 euros for a phone that only works for four hours before needing recharging. If I didn’t work from home I couldn’t have used it at all. In the past the support staff were very helpful and reasonably quick to respond so I wonder if FP2 has been sold to too many people too early as so many of us have problems with it. I was thinking of trying to sell it but couldn’t do that unless it starts to work properly.

On a practical note, it might be worth trying to get some action from them using Twitter.

Good luck,
Susannah

2 Likes

… or Germany or France.
They have local support numbers.
You can find them in this thread:

4 Likes

What about when your bottom module doesn’t work, so the other person can’t hear you, and you work 9:00 - 18:00 anyways, so can’t call during customer service hours anyways (Monday to Friday 9:30 - 17:30)??

Unusable phone with no reply from customer service: 13 days and counting…

:weary:

I totally understand your anger, frustration and complaints.
I had to wait 50 days for a first reply; quite lonng, even if over x-mas and new-years eve some delay could be expected.

But on the other hand: really, no break for a 10 minutes call?

It actually is hard to take a 10 min break for a call, but it was more the
physical inability to do so with a broken phone.

Anyways, I finally got the chance to sit down and open up my phone, took
out all the modules, blew on them for luck, plugged it all back together,
and everything now seems to be working fine, except for the left side of
the screen still doesn’t respond to touch.

I’ll take it though!

1 Like

I really understand the problem to make a call, when the thing is not working. :frowning:
And I agree, that the service hours are not exactly customer friendly.

Good to hear, that you could fix the issues beside the display.
If that is unresponsive on one side and cleaning the contacts did not help, there - as far as I am aware - is no other option but to change it.
I gues you already have seen this thread:

The smoothest way for getting a new display is to order one first, then return the broken one and get e refund for the new one.
There are at least two users I found after a short search in the tread, that were successful this way.

1 Like

Dear Fairphone team,

I am not looking for publicity but since you seem to be unable to communicate via your own ticket system or rather ensuing e-mails and since not even calling your support hotline (twice) seems to do the trick, I will reluctantly try this channel.

This is a friendly reminder: My initial ticket (#223587) with your customer support was filed on January, the 10th, 2018. That was nearly three months ago. Until now, you have not fixed one single issue my device is experiencing:

  • Random reboots; even after continuous software updates; you got a video

  • Broken touch functionality; I cannot activate any icons along the long edges of the screen; you got a screenshot

  • Inoperative proximity sensor; screen is unusable during calls; the power button had to be remapped to end calls

  • A broken backcover; apparently, carrying the device in your trouser pockets is too much strain for the plastic; the component was swapped once on my own account

The device was about 18 months old when I filed the initial ticket and all these issues are cases to be covered by your warranty, would you decide to care. So far, I have been in contact with people by the names of Marco, Randy and Malena and their approaches to customer support all have been rather erratic, in positive terms. In more realistic wording: You guys have the extremely unpleasant tendency to just abandon dialogue without reason.

Please do your job. Three months are way too long and having to deal with you people as well as having to use a mobile phone that is 50% junk and 50% brick (roughly estimated) is extremely frustrating.

Cheers!

2 Likes

11 posts were split to a new topic: About Support’ working hours

I’m sorry to hear about your experience, but posting on this community forum won’t get the support team’s attention.
I’d try calling again. Just make sure you try it during office hours. And I don’t know if this is still true, but last I heard support is not taking calls on Thursdays.

Yeah, well thanks for the hint, paulakreuzer.

As stated before, this was a last-resort-kind-of-thing. I already had called support twice. I have two tickets and like a hundred outgoing e-mails. The post was not meant to appear here. It was moved by an admin. I did not intend to interrupt your conversation.

That said, I can confirm that Fairphone support is the worst. It is incredible. I am convinced, every regular company would have gone out of business by now. Fairphone just seems to stress the we-are-not-regular-but-the-good-ones-idea very hard. Too hard, if you ask me. I went from just not recommending Fairphone to now actively discouraging people.

Oh and for everybody who is stuck in Fairphone support hell: Posting around here actually might help. Seems like Fairphone is afraid of bad publicity, after all. Less than 24 hours after posting here, I got the offer of a refurbished unit. I need to stress that this is nothing special, but what should have been offered about two-and-a-half months ago.

I think, if you are looking for support, you should also refrain from being too polite. I am convinced, Fairphone knows their product is bad and their customer support catastrophic. Being the polite guy will result in support just delaying your issue, since you do not mean too much trouble. It is what happened to me.

CU!

4 Likes

I’m sure that is coincident.

No you should most definitely not. The more impolite you get the less info you usually put in the same amount of text, making work for support harder and delays longer.

If their product was bad then they’d have gone out of business a long time ago. Even their fairness couldn’t compensate for an actual bad product.

To paraphrase Ice-T:
I’m sure there are 99 factors that are relevant for how fast your requests are being handled, but whether you are being a b**** ain’t one.

4 Likes

Dear Rod,

as sad as it is, it is good to hear that I am not the only one suffering under the poor support and customer service.
I am really disapointed with my Fairphone 2 and the support that I’ve recived from fairphone.
I am regretting buying it.
Right at the beginning I had the problem that my phone constantly rebooted. It took a while to get a responce from customer service. They recommended to do the lastest update, which fortunatly solved the problem.
The about 5 weeks ago my display started to behave strangly, it didn’t respond to touch, didn’t turn on, started to flicker and the picture to run up and down.
I emailed customer support and surprisingly I had a responce with in one day. But then it took various emails before I was instructed to take videos of the display misbehaving.
After I did that I was told that a technican needs to look at this issue. I haven’t had a responce since. So I called them. I was told by the represntive that they are sorry that it’s been talking this long and that she will talk to the other person that had been in contact with me and get back to me. Again no responce since then.
I do find it unbelivable that a compnay that is so proud of it’s suposssed sustainability is taking such a lack approach to it’s product being faulty and to customer support!
I’m not sure how to deal with this from here on. But the worst is that I don’t have a funktioning phone and as a selfemployed person this is a real problem!

3 Likes

I love this dope attitude bro…

wtf…aren´t you a bit too hardcore here…? :laughing:

if so, I´ll be there for you son…as long as a b**** ain´t one
word :sweat_smile:

Generally I think now as FP also has more business partners to provide service to it may not yet have scaled up its support team to handle all support requests of whatever kind within an acceptable period of time. Showing poor support to business partners may lead to much higher drawbacks (penalties) than with most private customers. Maybe this is a cause why some requests take longer to be processed which leaves private customers with the impression of not being appropriate appreciated.
I also think a first judgement of being within/out of warranty is done in advance to take some pressure out.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 182 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.