Recommendation to Arlo Management

[AncientGeek]

Dear Arlo Managment Team,

You have grown a very significant business over the past two or three years.  Your business includes not only your employees, suppliers and your stockholders, it most importly includes your customers.  As customers of Arlo products, we have placed a higher level of trust in you and your products than we do when we buy typical consumer electronics.  We are trusting you and your products to help us protect our property and our families.  This is an incredible level of trust on our part, resulting in an incredible level of responsibility on your part.

You pushed out a new release that did significant harm to Arlo customers and severely damaged our belief that you deserve our trust for the extremely important service we require of your product ecosystem.  Some customers are actively leaving your system, writing negative reviews and (no doubt) telling all their friends to steer clear of Arlo because they don’t adequately appreciate the importance of the role their products and ecosystem play in the everyday lives of Arlo customers.

This Arlo Community is an excellent vehicle for customer engagement, yet you appear to be largely ignoring the power and importance of proactive customer engagement, instead opting for silence or at most an insulting and aloof sound bite from time to time.

You owe your customers an apology for the recent damage you have inflicted.  You owe your customers an explanation as to your planned repairs and continuous updates as to your progress against your plan.  You owe your customers acknowledgment of their observations of the degradation of their customer experience and communication as to what you plan to do to reinstate the higher level customer experience they had when they originally bought into the Arlo ecosystem.

But this obligation is not a negative.  Customer engagement is how you build trust and loyalty.  Customer engagement fills the vacuum and dramatically decreases the level of anxiety, anger and negative feedback your customers will feel and provide during difficult times.  Ultimately, customer engagement builds goodwill and builds your business.  It informs your product development and provides a vehicle for invaluable direct feedback well in advance of your quarterly sales figures and at a level that is actionable.

Please engage with this community.  We desperately need your engagement...and so does your business.  

[DawnM]

Hello all,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention, it sounds like something is amiss in the last couple of days with our spam filter. We definitely don't want to censor you guys, in fact, your feedback assists us in prioritizing updates, and gauging how you our customers feel about our products. There are a few instances where we will edit posts, and on rare occasion delete them, but that's usually for something like cursing, threatening, or posting private information. I will work with our IT department to get the spam filter issue resolved. Thanks again for letting us know!

[Cwmmmm]

On top of improvements on here, move your customer service to the us!! Can’t understand when on the phone and they do not help!! Would be awesome if it was real support like ring.

[bowserb46]

Is it possible that Netgear spun off Arlo just to get rid of the problem child that was bringing the whole company down?  Kind of a sink or swim scenario, where sink was the more likely result?  I bought the Arlo Doorbell and base station, not realizing that there was a high probability that my existing door chime wouldn't work and I'd have to also buy a chime.  I have existing video surveillance including two cameras that look at the front door from different angles, so no need of another camera, I thought. 

As it turns out, it is not convenient to look at my cameras remotely while answering the phone call from Arlo, so I considered an Arlo camera, which it appears will cost me another $120.  Clearly I should have bought a Ring doorbell in the first place.  So, would I be throwing good money after bad buying a $120 camera from a company whose record (with me and apparently a lot of others) is disappointing at best?  Or should I just bite the bullett and buy a Ring doorbell camera now.  Amazon bought Ring, not Arlo.  Netgear spun off Arlo.  Today when I was browsing cameras on the Arlo site, I had a survey pop up.  When I finished browsing, I went to the survey.  At the end of the survey, when I clicked submit, it crashed.  I wonder if Arlo will still be around in five years.

[AncientGeek]

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@bowserb46 wrote:

Is it possible that Netgear spun off Arlo just to get rid of the problem child that was bringing the whole company down?  Kind of a sink or swim scenario, where sink was the more likely result?  I bought the Arlo Doorbell and base station, not realizing that there was a high probability that my existing door chime wouldn't work and I'd have to also buy a chime.  I have existing video surveillance including two cameras that look at the front door from different angles, so no need of another camera, I thought. 

As it turns out, it is not convenient to look at my cameras remotely while answering the phone call from Arlo, so I considered an Arlo camera, which it appears will cost me another $120.  Clearly I should have bought a Ring doorbell in the first place.  So, would I be throwing good money after bad buying a $120 camera from a company whose record (with me and apparently a lot of others) is disappointing at best?  Or should I just bite the bullett and buy a Ring doorbell camera now.  Amazon bought Ring, not Arlo.  Netgear spun off Arlo.  Today when I was browsing cameras on the Arlo site, I had a survey pop up.  When I finished browsing, I went to the survey.  At the end of the survey, when I clicked submit, it crashed.  I wonder if Arlo will still be around in five years.

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I have assumed Arlo was spinoff because they saw a lot of potential for product line expansion and the increase in revenue and stock value for an independent company would be significantly higher than for the same bump on top of the existing base of revenue and profit.  But that was just my speculation.

I have a Ring Pro with two regular doorbell chimes.  I designed the system from scratch, so I spec’d and bought a high output transformer.  Ring has problems also, but I’m am a strong advocate for multivendor security solutions.  It doesn’t make sense to place all of your eggs in one basket.  There will be bugs.  There will be downtime.  Having components from multiple vendors minimizes the likelihood of a failure doing harm to entire security environment.  

When I see these companies all trying to offer overlapping components that were previously specialized offerings from other vendors, I cringe.  I don’t want a single monolithic environment!  I want fault tolerance.  I want excellence in a single area of focus and not mediocrity across a broad product portfolio.  All of these companies are so afraid of being marginalized by a competitor with a comprehensive product portfolio that they are all stretching themselves too thin in terms of talent and money.  So all of their customers receive inferior products across their entire product line.  There is a blinding light between their promise and their reality.  But I digress...

Like you I tried to submit a survey and it crashed.  I actually laughed out loud that they couldn’t even solicit customer feedback reliably.  I decided not to bother posting about my experience, it is just too much work.

However, I am currently very happy that Arlo has significantly recovered from the nightmare of the past six months as a customer.  I hope they continue to iron out the bugs and REALLY HOPE they don’t break it again as they have several times since I became a customer in 2015.  Now I will do my usual Select All and Copy to make sure I don’t lose all of this due to some community site software bug...which also seems to be better recently.

[trickytcamgeek]

I love the Arlo system, and cameras but I won’t buy any more after the software fiasco last year.  I don’t trust them to listen to consumers.  Incidentally Arlo are being sued in the US for allegedly hiding information from investors. 

[AncientGeek]

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@trickytcamgeek wrote:

I love the Arlo system, and cameras but I won’t buy any more after the software fiasco last year.  I don’t trust them to listen to consumers.  Incidentally Arlo are being sued in the US for allegedly hiding information from investors. 

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Law suits always follow bad news that was not disclosed...even if the bad news was completely unanticiapted by management.