EA's Product Support Challenges My Will To Live
A week and a half ago I decided to take the very generous offer that EA had put forth to replace Rock Band Guitars that don't function properly. A co-worker had done it and it had worked well for her so I decided to give it a shot. I went to the Rock Band product support website and registered for a replacement guitar. I decided to take advantage of the Express delivery option. Using this I'd put $125 down as a deposit and then they'd 2-day mail me a guitar. Take the new guitar out of the box, put the old guitar in and send it back with the pre-paid slip. Easy as punch.
Upon completing the registration and inputting my credit card number I was told to wait for the confirmation email. It didn't arrive that day and I got distracted by other things and didn't think about it until a couple days later. I decided to call up the EA technical support hotline (which is impossible to find if you don't have the game manual right there, so that adds 15 minutes to the call time). After waiting on hold and being forced to listen to awful hold music from the Burnout games and Madden I finally got in contact with someone there. He told me that the guitar had been shipped and he gave me a tracking number, a reference number, and an RMA number. I checked the tracking number on the UPS website and it said it was already in town and out for delivery. Great!
The day passes and no truck arrives. I go to the tracking page and it says the package has been delivered to the "mail room" to someone named "Macy". Well great, only we don't have a mail room, and who the hell is Macy. At this point I'm still not panicking because I know that UPS sometimes delivers to the Post Office who then actually take it to the address. I give it another day to arrive. It doesn't.
I call UPS and they say that something has happened and that the local UPS distribution center will call me if they can figure out what happened to it. I call EA and tell them that UPS lost the package and that I'd like a refund on my $125 and for them to send out an empty box for the standard replacement. For some reason the support person's phone keeps cutting out and breaking off and I am disconnected before I can confirm the details. Since I took a break to call him during my work day and I didn't have time to call back I had to hope that everything worked out. Heading back to my computer I saw a new ticket added in on their site and figured it had gone through.
A couple hours later I got a call from the local UPS distribution center. They'd figured out what had happened. Apparently they delivered the guitar to the mail room of one of the dorms on the university campus near my house. They had no explanation for this. They offered to send a driver to retrieve it the next day but I told them I would go pick it up myself. After work a friend and I walked across the campus and went to the mail room and claimed the package (maybe from Macy, I didn't ask).
I packed the old guitar and sent it back and I figured that even with the muddled delivery, that was that. Well the guitar should have arrived by now and I still haven't received my deposit back. On Friday I received a box in the mail from EA games. It's a box for drums. I called technical support Saturday and they told me that they don't have record of the guitar being returned or even sent. Then she told me she was going to escalate the issue.
"I'm going to have a senior customer service person call you tomorrow," she said.
"Why not today?"
"They're not here on weekends."
"So they're going to call me tomorrow."
"Yes."
"Which is a Sunday..."
"Mhmm."
Right now I'm pretty sure that my $125 is gone for good. I realize that EA games isn't at fault for the delivery but they completely mishandled every point where they were involved. I don't know what to do. Ideas?
