Haven't received updates about Versa 3 return process

[GrumpyKen]

So, I'll attempt to paste in the email that bounced back with the excuse that Fitbit doesn't support via email anymore. Here ya go, friends:

Oh yeah, "2. Prepare—In a small box or padded envelope, package the Fitbit device. You'll receive an email message from Fitbit Support with the list of items to include. Be sure to put your label on the front." 

I never got any other email from Fitbit support but did return the entire brand new Versa3 and all contents in the less than 6-hour old package that I received. Yeah, the new Versa3 lasted less than 6 hours after opening, charging and configuring the apps.

========================================================
(email "reply-to:" in response to initial acknowledgement from support after a ~2-hour debugging session):

To report that I am disappointed and extremely upset with Fitbit's defective product replacement system would be an understatement.

Now that FedEx has apparently failed to return the defective product for an entire business week, do I understand that you will not ship the replacement until the defective return is delivered to you?

After USPS tracking advised me of your return system (see forwarded dialog below), I just checked the FedEx tracking page. Here is the result of that inquiry:

Travel history
Date    Time, Status and Location
Tuesday, 7/5/2022    5:30 PM Shipment information sent to FedEx

Wednesday, 7/6/2022    9:56 AM At U.S. Postal Service facility
    Accepted by U.S. Postal Service - Tracking ID

Thursday, 7/7/2022    7:53 AM At U.S. Postal Service facility In transit to shipper/merchant DENVER CO NETWORK DISTRIBUTION
    11:19 AM At U.S. Postal Service facility In transit to shipper/merchant DENVER CO NETWORK DISTRIBUTION
    11:29 AM At U.S. Postal Service facility In transit to shipper/merchant DENVER CO NETWORK DISTRIBUTION
    2:36 PM At U.S. Postal Service facility In transit to shipper/merchant DENVER CO NETWORK DISTRIBUTION
    3:55 PM At U.S. Postal Service facility In transit to shipper/merchant DENVER CO NETWORK DISTRIBUTION
Saturday, 7/9/2022    1:51 AM At U.S. Postal Service facility In transit to shipper/merchantDENVER CO DISTRIBUTION CENTER

Please provide me with updated replacement product status and your expedited final delivery date. If your returns system was functional, the returned defective product would have been in your hands no later than today. With the weekend now upon us, it appears that it will be Monday or Tuesday at best before FedEx gets that return into your facility and probably another day or two for the replacement product to be shipped via mule train. Until Fitbit gives FedEx a sound spanking for their failure, it is the Fitbit brand that will be soiled by this failed process.

Regards,

=====================================================================
-------- Forwarded Message --------

Subject:Date:From:To:

Re: Service Request

Sat, 9 Jul 2022 12:33:08 -0600

Thank you for your prompt attention, Juan. I will certainly advise FitBit of their broken support and return services. Their irresponsibility in this matter is a blemish on their brand, and I will certainly advertise that fact. Please close this ticket in your system.

Best regards to you,

=========================================================================

On 7/9/2022 11:50 AM - Calexico, CA wrote:

Good afternoon,

Your return item is part of the Parcel Return Service. This is an agreement between USPS and FedEx. The item is initially dropped off by the customer with the USPS. USPS then tenders the item to FedEx, who comes and picks up the item. That is how the process for this service works. From there FedEx takes it the rest of the way and delivers it. You can use your same tracking # which is highlighted in the screen shot below from FedEx.com. They are in possession of your item. All future status updates will be available on their website and all further inquiries should be addressed to them. The USPS tracking will have no further updates and the item will not be given back to USPS. Unfortunately Fitbit is not clear with its customers on how this return service works because we are receiving thousands of inquiries due to the confusion.

Moderator Edit: Clarified subject and personal info removed

[GrumpyKen]

Sheesh! Mine lasted less than 6 hours out of the box.

Was setting it up and configuring favored apps. Laid down for a 1 hour snooze (wearing the Fitbit). Upon waking from the nap, any touch to the screen or swipe in any direction brought up some calculator. Followed all the reset steps in the docs with no result. Then spent nearly 2 hours on the phone with a support guy going through all the same reset steps with no results. They sent me a return product label along with a notation that they would email shortly telling me what all to package up and send back. Seeing no such email within any reasonable time (many days later, it still has not arrived), I just put the Veresa3 back in the box I had taken it out of that very morning, including everything contained in that factory box, and dropped it at the local post office. Tracking then showed the package sitting in a Denver Distribution Center for 3 days or so, right up to this morning. (See my fully documented comment about lack of support above)

Fitbit won't ship a replacement to this brand new - less than 6 hours old - Versa3 until they get the returned defective product. Unfortunately, FedEx had failed to pick up the return package in Denver, so it will be next week at best before Fitbit gets the returned defective product and goes through their bureaucratic games before shipping out a replacement via pony express or 20-team mule train or whatever.

I should have just bought one of the $60 to $70 knockoffs. They all run the same apps and offer the same or better biometric features.

I wonder if Fitbit sells a lot of "extended warranties" by practicing and refining such pitiful QA and support?

[GrumpyKen]

Lucky you! Mine lasted less than 6 hours. Two+ hours of that were spent personally trying to reset or debug the device and ~two more hours on phone support going through the exact same reset steps I had just tried.

See my "lack of email support" rant above.

[Odyssey13]

Hi @GrumpyKen  your posts were merged together so when the Fitbit Moderator I asked to stop by is here, they can read all your posts in one location and you can see them. I'm not sure if this helps, but I have a package coming from California to the east coast and FedEx says there is a weather delay on it. Might just be a delay with FedEx and there's nothing Fitbit can do to speed it along. 

[GrumpyKen]

The weather in Denver has been severe clear all week. No reason FedEx has not picked up the shipment. Blaming FedEx for failures in Fitbit's service is unacceptable - especially when absolutely no communication has come from Fitbit about the problems.

Bottom line is that it is Fitbit's brand that gets a black eye when products AND support fail.
The number of threads in this forum about defective Versa3's is mind boggling. There is obviously no QA in place in the Fitbit organization. Such high volume of defective units points to undeniable upper management failures.

[LizzyFitbit]

Hi there, @GrumpyKen. @Odyssey13 Thanks for the heads up and your help.

@GrumpyKen Thanks for the detailed information, and your efforts while contacting us. As you may know, every case is handle individually and based on our Warranty Policy. However, I understand where you're coming from and I'm sorry for this experience. Your feedback is appreciated and please know it won't go unnoticed as it'll help us to improve our procedures and services.

I went ahead to check your details and it seems our team already sent you an email with more information. If you haven't done so, check your inbox, spam or junk folders, and keep an open communication with them as I'm sure they'll continue helping you.

In regards to your other inquiry, let me explain that we're no longer offering support by email when starting a new interaction. For this reason, we recommend chatting with us online or giving us a call by clicking here. You can also reply back to the last email sent by our Support team to follow up your case.

[GrumpyKen · Accepted solution]

Thank you for the update, Lizzy. Yes, I did finally get a much-delayed response to that email about the same time you posted this forum reply. I will not reproduce the email addresses, bounce messages or other details related to this pitiful support example.

Further, while again thinking you for your understanding, I will acknowledge that a mere cubical dweller or telecommuting support agent does not make company policy and cannot influence said policies, so please do not take the remainder of this reply personally.

I did just check the tracking on the returned defective product. If it would help to paste in the tracking details, I would be happy to do so, but will refrain from taking that step at this time. As previously documented, the return package was promptly delivered by the USPS to their Denver Distribution Center. It ended up sitting there for a full week before FedEx picked up the package to carry on the next leg. Now FexEd is estimating delivery to your return's depot on the 15th. That will be two full weeks to deliver a package that USPS could likely have completed in 5 days or less (based on all my previous experiences)

As an informed citizen/consumer I must point out that Fitbit's policy of using this hybrid shipping service appears to be implicit support for Postmaster DeJoy's acknowledged campaign to cripple, privatize and ultimately eliminate our 274 year old postal services. That your executive management is causing your company to engage in this radical and destructive assault on one of our trusted and treasured institutions is just additional evidenced that Fitbit's policymakers have no respect for we citizen/consumers. They also demonstrate that efficiency in service delivery is a far lower priority than executives' mis-informed priorities.

So, allowing for the unjustifiable 5 day hold for warranty replacements after and if you do get the return package, and another 5-10 days to ship the replacement, it will have taken somewhere around a full month to honor the new product warranty for a defective product that lasted less than 6 hours out of the box. That is on top of the non-existent product QA that allows such defects to continue to be shipped, as evidenced by the multiple reports in these forums

I suspect the forum moderators will "sanitize" this feedback out of the public view, but perhaps some conscientious agent will anonymously forward my observations to some executive with enough of a sense of ethics to work toward remedies.

My only thanks would be to the research institute who gifted this device to me in exchange for allowing them access to my biometrics in support of a much broader research initiative. Even allowing for that, this education into Fitbit's Unfit Brand has been worth the slight frustration.

Have a great day/week/life.

PS to other citizen/consumers: just go for the $70 knock-off smart watch. the apps & biometrics are mostly the same and the quality couldn't be any worse.

[GrumpyKen]

Well, I finally have an update on the first phase of the warranty replacement sham. When the CSR issued the RMA and sent the return shipment label, he said I should have the replacement in hand in roughly 10 business days at the most. LOL

Well, I deposited the return package at the local Post Office drop box on July 5 and it was logged into the USPS tracking system on July 6 at 9:56am. After delivery to the Denver Distribution Center on July 7 at 7:53 am, it sat there waiting for FedEx to pick iit up until July 11 (4 days waiting for FedEx to even begin their routings). It then took from July 11 at 4:05pm until July 20 at 11:00pm for FedEx to deliver the return package to Fitbit's warranty center in Calexico, CA. (9 days for FedEx to transport the 0.6lbs package, on top of the 4 days it took them to pick it up from USPS for a total of roughly 15+ days of FedEx simply 'not showing up for work')

Fitbit will point the finger at FedEx and claim they have no control over that process. Nonsense! If any employee failed to show up for work for over 15 days, what would management do about it? I'll await Fitbit Management's answer to that.

So, for a return of a product that lasted roughly 6 hours "in service" (of which half that time was devoted to trying to reset and reinitialize the defective product) it took 365.5 hours to return the defective product for warranty replacement. By way of another measure, the time to return the product to the warranty center was 6,092% longer than the "in service time for the product. AND Fitbit has yet to acknowledge receipt of the returned product.

From what I understand from policy documents and replies here from support agents, Fitbit will now sit on the returned product for a minimum of 5 business days (7 calendar days from today) before even shipping a replacement for this defective brand new Versa3. Assuming delivery performance equivalent to what I've experienced thus far, it will be another 5+15 = ~20  days to get the warrantied replacement (for a total of 35 days for Fitbit to honor the warranty). Off the top of my head math, that would mean that warranty service would require about 15,000% more time to fulfil than the new product provided "in service'. Amazing?

What can or will the Fitbit brand do to remedy this inexcusable customer service experience?

BTW - I never did receive any response to my query about why Fitbit continues to ship known defective products or if there is a mechanism in place to remotely update and fix the device's OS. But that IS another entirely separate discussion.

For any member of management interested in looking into the details of this utter failure (highly unlikely), here are the relevant tracking and case numbers:

For the benefit of any potential consumers browsing these forums, I repeat my suggestion to just buy the knockoff smart watch for at least 50% less than the Fitbit branded version. The product reliability and customer service could not be any worse.

Moderator Edit: Personal info removed