When Customer Support is Your Achilles Heel (Premium)

This morning, my Fitbit Charge 3 band broke at the buckle. But getting it replaced under warranty was an even worse experience.

Look, I get it: Fitbit straps---like all fitness band straps---must break at an alarming rate. And replacements are cheap: I can buy three third-party Charge 3 bands on Amazon.com for less than $7 (!). But the problem with this sort of thing is that you never think to have extra bands waiting for the inevitable. So when one does break, you need the replacement immediately.

And “immediately” is clearly not in Fitbit’s dictionary.

As my customer support chat reveals, the firm is purposefully making the experience of replacing a band under warranty---my Fitbit Charge 3 arrived in October 2018 and comes with a one-year warranty---as painful as possible. The chat is full of pointless interactions and extra steps, designed, I’m sure, to make most people simply give up, get in the car, and drive over to a local Best Buy or whatever. Where they can buy a replacement strap immediately, albeit at an extravagant cost: A single replacement band there can cost as much as $25. That’s almost 11 times the cost of a single comparable band at Amazon.com (where $7 divided by 3 is $2.35). And far more than the cost of a warranty replacement, which is---or should be---free.

Rather than annotate the chat, which I’ve printed in full below, I’ll just point out a few problems I have with this process.

Once I got into the chat, the first thing I was asked was my email address. Which I had already supplied, along with a lot of other personal information, in order to even be able to speak with an agent. Or bot. It’s not clear. I was the 10th in line for support on a Sunday morning.

(Regarding the bot thing, there were a few misspellings that might make one believe that you were talking to a human. But that may be purposeful. Or it may have really been a human.)

I was then asked for my country of residence. Which was also part of that information I had previously supplied.

What you're not seeing here is the lengthy wait between each interaction. Nothing happened immediately, and this entire chat probably took over 30 minutes or at least close to that, from the moment finally Benjamin showed up.

Then I had to supply what many would consider to be an impossible photo: One that shows the tiny Fitbit logo on the tiny strap keeper loop, the actual damage (which is two hairline cracks in the rubber, which is impossible to see without a magnifying glass), and my case number, hand-written on a piece of paper. I sent a shot showing a closeup of the damage first, thanks to the Mate 20 Pro’s macro-photography capabilities. And was I then admonished about the need for a hand-written case number. Also, I could only send one photo.

I was surprised they accepted the one photo I finally did send, which had to be taken from far enough back that you could see that number. It is impossible to see the Fitbit logo o...