We don’t normally respond to customer complaints like this in public, but since the complaint is public, we have to respond in public:
First, regarding the dongle recall, we want to point out that there was a bug in the Z-Wave chips causing intermittent problems with some types of networks. The bug effected every company selling Z-Wave controllers, so many products from many manufacturers had the bug. We pushed Sigma, who makes the Z-Wave chip, for many months to get it fixed. When they did, to our knowledge, no other Z-Wave manufacturer except us agreed to foot the cost of recalling and replacing the defective chips. All other customers with Z-Wave controllers from other manufacturers have to just live with it. So, we have gone beyond what is considered standard in the industry by replacing dongles at our expense. Remember the exact same thing happened a long time ago when Intel uncovered a bug in their CPU’s that caused certain calculations to produce wrong results. Nobody, not even the biggest names like Sony, HP, etc., agreed to recall and replace the computer’s at their expense because of the bug in Intel’s chip.
So the customer’s accusation that we provide bad customer service is just plain wrong; nobody else is providing the service we do as far as this goes. Naturally, since we are footing the bill ourselves to replace the flawed Z-Wave chips, we want to keep our costs as low as possible on the recall. Like any company, when you spend too much in one area, you just have less to spend in other areas. So if we did like the customer wanted, namely buying everybody new dongles at full retail and paying for expedited shipping, it just means we’d have less money for product development. We figured it was better to do the recall as cost effectively as possible since the old dongles were intermittent and fleeting and didn’t cause major problems; after all everybody who bought a controller from another manufacturer has to just live with the problem indefinitely.
The instructions for the dongle recall were clear. 1) The customer places on order in the shipping cart on our site, 2) We send the customer a new dongle, 3) When the customer gets the new dongle he transfers the network from the old dongle to the new one, 4) The customer sends back the old dongle.
This customer didn’t follow the procedure. Instead he sent his dongle in first without waiting for the new one, and he didn’t want to wait for the next shipment of dongles, but instead wanted us to buy him a new dongle at retail and expedite the shipping. That wasn’t what we were offering to do as part of the recall. We did, however, send his new dongle already and even, in this one case, expedited the shipping to try to keep him happy. But, despite that, the customer is still upset because we waited for our shipment of dongles to arrive, which we buy from the manufacturer at wholesale, instead of buying him a new dongle at retail.