Saturday, August 13, 2016

Testing Belkin's product support


The Amazon Vine Program sent me a Belkin Power Rockstar Battery Pack to review this week. It works perfectly with one exception: The included 3¾" lightning cable won't work with my iPhone 6. It is an alarmingly tight fit and generates an error message on the phone warning that "this device may not be compatible." And it isnt. Won't charge with the Belkin cable, but works fine with my OEM Apple lightning cable. I wrote a review for Amazon.com reflecting that shortcoming.

I decided to test Belkin's product support this morning. I spent about 15 minutes on an online chat with someone named Saranya that resulted in being assigned a Belkin case number and being referred to their 800 number. There, I encountered a young man who said his name is Hero who searched high and low for a replacement cable, but the best he could do was a 6" cable that would not fit into the receptacle on the battery pack like the original cable and would, therefore, be useless to me. The other option was to replace the whole package, which required sending them a photograph of the battery pack and its two cables in exchange for a shipping label for the return. I went with the second option.

An incidental observation is that Belkin, like most other companies whose product support I've called, has hideously distorted music on hold. I think it's intentionally distorted in the hope that it will discourage people from staying on the line.

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