331–340 of 453 posts
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Yes, the device the user paid 99 dollars for and is now useless. So for the user to get his money back he has to send back the device.
And? That's how it works.
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I absolutely agree. From an outsider, the reaction from Garadget will stay in my mind far longer than the initial review. Imagine this in a bricks and mortar high-street shop? 'The customer is always right' is a difficult but noble stance - if a customer is being difficult, suck it up, be sickly nice then go out the back and scream when they've left.
A lot of brick and mortar shops actually have a sign that says "We reserve the right to refuse service."
Seems like a direct descendent of the "no dogs, no natives" signs - https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/475.html
The only difference is that now they are smart enough not to spell out the criteria for discrimination in public access venues.
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You can require your customers to show decorum if you choose.
Fair enough, but please tell them that before they enter a contract with you. Don't take their cash followed by not providing a service for reasons not stipulated before accepting the money.
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It's quite clear a lot of people in here are approaching this with a "B2B" mindset where clients and contracts can be fired and terminated. This scenario is "B2C", "the customer is always right" may be a tired phrase but it rings truer than you might think. A lot of people are saying this guy should be respectful of this small, indiegogo compnay. Problem is, they are ignoring the fact the product is being sold on Ama…
I don't agree. As a freelancer, when I do business with someone, I expect them to comport themselves in a civilized manner. If they're too thick or ill-bred to manage it, they can take their money elsewhere. I don't see why it should be different for any company. The exchange of money isn't a license to ignore standards of social interaction between equals.
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It's quite clear a lot of people in here are approaching this with a "B2B" mindset where clients and contracts can be fired and terminated. This scenario is "B2C", "the customer is always right" may be a tired phrase but it rings truer than you might think. A lot of people are saying this guy should be respectful of this small, indiegogo compnay. Problem is, they are ignoring the fact the product is being sold on Ama…
I don't agree. As a freelancer, when I do business with someone, I expect them to comport themselves in a civilized manner. If they're too thick or ill-bred to manage it, they can take their money elsewhere. I don't see why it should be different for any company. The exchange of money isn't a license to ignore standards of social interaction between equals.
Feel free to piss off your customers at your own peril.
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> the support engineer's response (that ends with blocking the user's device for good) _is_ a bona fide tantrum, worthy of textbooks. I don't think that's a support engineer. I'm pretty sure that's Denis Grisak, the founder of Garadget. I find it fascinating that he used the phrase "only demonstrates your poor impulse control" to the customer while arguably his own response seems to suggest his own impulse control ma…
That explains some things. I have been a founder too, and I am aware that this is a lot more stressful than it seems from the outside, and this one star review might have been the last straw. However, dealing with angry customers is a part of the job (like everything else, until proper employees are hired). Let's say that this person is not particularly good at said job.
It's not like he was being abusive to an individual support staff member, he cussed about the app in an Amazon review and on their forum because it was genuinely failing for him. Nothing wrong with that, people get worked up when stuff doesn't work sometimes, you need to be able to handle some level of that when doing support for your product.
And worse, they're selling a physical product which they just made effectively useless after that customer invested time in installation and setup. Sad to see the warnings about cloud services being abused in this way seem to be quite true.
I'm pretty surprised by the comments here on decorum and civility. The customer called the product a "piece of shit" - yes he used bad language, but he's criticising the product itself. An object. The rep. directly insulted the customer's character (saying he had "poor impulse control" and was throwing a "tantrum"). Is this another example of American tendencies to be extra sensitive about "profanity" or am I missing…
I'm also surprised at the amount of overly sensitive people defending Garadget here. Their basis -- that this customer was likely brought up wrong -- is a bit amusing. It suggests that the defenders were brought up to judge others based a single interaction, without any thought of context, or anything but the barest of social awareness. 'course, here I am doing the judging now.
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Nope. If you've already sold them the product, you really cannot do this.
No? If I went into a store to complain and my first words were "what kind of shit have I bought here?", then I don't think I'd have any cause for complaint if I were forcibly ejected and told to come back when I'd learnt how to behave myself. Same should apply online.
The store owner could go to jail, because that is called theft.
Screwing over customers has a cost.
This story went viral. And now this business is going to receive hundreds of negative reviews.
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I made a decision long ago that any "IoT" or "cloud" based physical device in my home will be one that I build myself and that I control access to exclusively. So far, I haven't been motivated by the current commercial offerings to build a clone of any of them, though I'm considering a homebrew Echo clone just because I'm fascinated by voice recognition and voice control. The Raspberry Pi, with the release of the Zer…
Until you realize there are no voice recognation softwares that work well enough to not use Google or Amazon on the backend.
There is an actual reason to use the cloud for apps like this: there is enough data to power the machine learning algorithms at scale. Although I'm a hardware hacker I know I'd never be able to build a homebrew Echo running completely in my own house.
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No, I'm sorry, that is not perfectly acceptable behaviour. It's not illegal - but it's also not helpful, or constructive, and nor is it desirable if you're trying to build a helpful community. There are other ways of getting your point across, without resorting to insults such as "piece of s*it". In Chinese, we might call this 家教 - or "upbringing". If you have no decorum, or class - it suggests that your upbringing w…
> In Chinese, we might call this 家教 - or "upbringing". If you have no decorum, or class - it suggests that your upbringing was poor, or that your parents failed to raise you well. It's impressive that you're able to extrapolate the questioners life up until this point based on three words. If the product in question is a shitty product, there's no problem describing it as such.
A more amusing instance of this outlook at work: http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1940-china-one-p...