Just when it seemed that the drama surrounding the faulty Galaxy Note 7 batteries was over and Samsung started issuing replacements and resuming sales, those very same replacements have shown that they needed replacing. Things aren’t looking good for the South Korean smartphone makers as the “safe” Galaxy Note 7 units are reportedly catching fire in a similar manner to their predecessors. Not surprisingly, this resulted in pretty much all major carriers halting the device sales mere days after resuming them and if yesterday’s reports are to be believed, even Samsung itself halted production of its latest flagship while it’s trying to figure out how to get to the bottom of this issue and simultaneously prevent any further brand damage.
Rumors of an unprecedented second recall are already circulating the industry and while it remains to be seen whether that actually happens, Samsung’s PR has more problems on the horizon. Namely, The Verge has just reported that the company isn’t exactly doing a great job of handling subsequent requests for refunds. Nilay Patel writes that Samsung’s customer service is slow to respond to consumers’ requests and when it does, the results are often less than stellar. More specifically, they’re barely readable. In fact, one such correspondence between Samsung and a certain corporate customer has just been leaked online. After failing to respond to an email from September 15th and a follow-up sent five days later, someone at Samsung finally took the time to write an answer to the said customer’s inquiry about a refund this Saturday, October 8th.
The first problem is that the person who wrote the email has a less-than-stellar grasp of the English language so the email is barely comprehensible. Secondly, while lengthy, the message doesn’t exactly answer the aforementioned customer’s question. It mentions some issues with mistaken order numbers which are slowing down both the replacement and the refund program and states that Samsung outsourced the program itself to “a company that specializes in recalls.” The problem with that is that Samsung has no way of checking on the status of each individual replacement or refund, writes the tech giant’s representative and offers no alternatives other than a link to the website of these recall specialists which has been redacted by the time this email was leaked online.
Samsung has yet to issue a conclusive statement regarding this latest ordeal and the way it’s handling it. More information is expected to follow soon.