Phone not working for 3 weeks

Hi,

I’ve now been without a Phone for over 3 weeks since my FP2 suddenly stopped working. I’ve been in touch with the support team who have all been very friendly and helpful, but I’ve had to wait several days between each response. It’s now been 5 days since on advice, I submitted a request for my phone to be taken in for repairs - and my request still has not been approved.

I really love what Fairphone stand for and want to support you. I’ve been holding out on buying a cheap temporary replacement phone, since it seems to stupid to invest in an ethical phone only to have to supplement it with the cheapest and probably least ethical phone available! But I’m self-employed and really struggling without my phone now.

If someone could please just go into my account and approve my request so that we can at least begin the repair process that would be excellent.

Thanks,
Alice

Fairphone support don’t usually read the forum. It seems that the quickest way of getting stuff is done by calling Fairphone. From their support pages:

Or call us: Monday to Friday 9:30 - 17:30 at +31 (0)20-788 4400.

@Johannes is right of course.

But you could try another approach as well, making use of this forum. You could send a pm to someone from the support team:
https://forum.fairphone.com/badges/100/fairphone-customer-support

For being able to send a pm you just have to reach the level of Basic User, which happens automatically spending some time in this forum, reading a few posts in some topics.
Here is how to send a private message

As I don’t know, how often they check for their pms, I would strongly suggest to try mail or phone again.
Tbh, in your case I would call them until the problem is solved (even if it’s just to get you off their back respective the phone ;))

Thanks both, I’d hoped to avoid a daytime international phone call, but it seems I have no choice! I just called them now, but was told that the repair request system was being updated and so there was nothing they could do about it today…

Alice,

I have the same issue.
I can’t use my phone properly and I haven’t heard back from my support request for the last 10 days.

As you said, “it seems to stupid to invest in an ethical phone only to have to supplement it with the cheapest and probably least ethical phone available”. But what are my options now?! I need a reliably working smartphone…

General consensus in the forum is …

I don’t have any complaints about the Fairphone itself - it always worked fine for me until it didn’t (but every smartphone will have some issues sometimes). But I have to say that it does seem that the support team is extremely underfunded. Everyone I’ve spoken to has been very friendly and trying their hardest, but the waiting times are awful. So far it’s been over three weeks now since my phone stopped working and we’re no closer to actually getting it fixed, I believe an adequate support team would have been able to get to this stage within 2 days max. And in my case, phoning the team doesn’t seem to have helped to get the matter moved along at all (although I will admit that they did at least answer the phone very quickly).

I can understand your complaints completely. See the post of @AdrianP here:

that might not be enough to appease you, but gives some explanation and shows, they really do their best.

In my opinion: We should always keep in mind, that Fairphone is a startup with a budget, that only reaches so far.
In a way, we as customers are also part of the team helping in the development of hard and software and in the elemination of errors. And even global players tend to have a bad handling of support; although with them its part of profit maximization rather than limited budget.
Let’s just hope and do everythig possible to keep the movement alive.
We should not applythe same high standards to Fairphone as the likes of Apple and Samsung. And even they are anything but flawless, just search the internet for XXX “support problems”.

Options could be

  • lend a phone if one of your friends has a spare phone they don’t need atm
  • buy a used phone, which will minimize environmental impct, since the phone already exists
  • switch back your old phone if you still have one (this was what I did, although using my SGS1 again was quite a pain admittedly)
1 Like

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