Customer Support

[CW7012]

I'm writing this with a heightened level of trepidation. I've had your Arlo Secure subscription with two cameras and the base hub for a couple of years, and I've been generally pleased with the service. One of the cameras has the common IR filter fault, but it's not a big deal as I can tolerate a little color goofiness. But what I cannot tolerate is your absolutely lousy customer support. 

I retired from 45 years in the telecom industry a few years back. My expertise was in technical, but as I got older and more experienced, I shifted into training and content development. My industry is notorious for outsourcing customer support off continent to India, the Philippines, and to South America, specifically places like Nicaragua. The decision to outsource customer support was purely financial - not customer centric, and our customer satisfaction scores reflected our customers' frustrations with people who speak very poor English, read from pre-prepared scripts, and have a little to no technical or billing account knowledge. 

That being said, we (my department specifically) would do our dead-level best to mitigate the language barriers issues, provide easy to understand and convey technical data, and support those outsourced centers in an effort to improve our awful CS scores. In the end, little progress was made, and the industry as a whole just panned it off because most of the operators are publicly traded, and as long as Wall Street was happy, the C-Level crew was too.

But here's the deal, your outsourced CS is the absolute worst I've ever encountered. The very poor level of communication and lack of knowledge about your company is in direct conflict with your polished, high quality and professional public projection. I was on a call a couple of days ago and got so frustrated that I told them I'm done with your company and will seek other options for my home security. That's a terrible ending to a conversation I initiated in good faith to resolve a very easy question to answer - "How do I retrieve videos stored on the USB device in my Smart Hub station?" 

I've since recanted and will stay with your service because I just don't want to go through the hassle of changing right now. I don't have the patience for it. But you need to do better with your call centers. And until there is some improvement, I have absolutely no reservations trashing your customer support publicly whenever the question is asked of me, whether in personal, private conversations or on public forums.  

Please reassure me you're going to improve your CS experience. If you trully care about your products and reputation you should be placing this as a top priority right now. 

[BrookeN]

Hi,

We appreciate your feedback regarding customer support. We take all feedback seriously and appreciate you bringing this to our attention. I will pass this onto the appropriate team. 

Thank you,

BrookeN.