American Express-Savings
- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 21 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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2 out of 2 people found this review helpful
0.5 stars
"Really upset customer"
Pros: Sure, Better features than SlingboxPro
Cons: Very poor reliability. Customer service from hell.
Summary: 1.0 out of 5 stars Good features. Lousy reliability. You'll go crazy trying to return it., June 12, 2008
By Savvy customer (San Jose, CA USA) - See all my reviews
Spent a long time comparing this to slingbox pro.
It's better in terms of features/cost. Used it for a week in pass-through mode for basic cable. Mostly worked great. Occasional disconnects here and there but bearable.
Cheap looking/build - but that wasn't important to me.
Then all of a sudden, it stops working (after over 1 week). Notice that pass through signal to TV is affected. Cannot tune in to certain channels and others have lots of static. TV problems go away when HAVA is removed.
Spent a few days debugging. Notice that pings from my laptop to the HAVA are unreliable. After trying everything, decided enough is enough. I'm an engineer. If it's an easy-to-fix problem and an engineer can't figure it out by following their debugging instructions, it's not worth it. Secondly, even if I figure it out, this should NOT be happening after 1 week of use.
Tried to return it. It's clear they're trying to save time/money by making use of their customers to perform trouble shooting. Instead of taking the unit back and debugging it in-house, they force me to describe my problems/debugging steps to customer support. On top of that the reps English is hard to understand (strong Indian accent).
Long story short, they WILL put you on hold repeatedly and do everything they can to try to make you debug the unit for them. After an hour, I finally had to REFUSE to do any more debugging and DEMANDED to speak to manager. Manager makes me repeat entire description of problem and tries his luck to convince me to debug again. I REFUSE. Finally, I say, look, even if I debug it for you and find the problem, I'm NOT going to keep the unit. If it stops working after a week, it's SUB-STANDARD and I'm returning it. He finally relents.
Story doesn't end here. I get transferred back to rep. Rep says he'll email me the RMA number in 2 hours. Never happens. Next day, I call back. He says, they're "discussing the return case with sales". What? Sales has to approve a return? So still no RMA.
Day 3. I call back and ask for RMA. A new floor manager then tries to make me repeat the entire problem description all over. I blow my top. I tell him the website clearly says Hava has a 30 day money back guarantee IF YOU'RE NOT SATISFIED. It doesn't say the return is contingent on me debugging the bloody device for them. Manager says, "fine, fine, no problem, I have your RMA here .... but wait ... I have one more thing for you ... we'd like to send you a replacement. I yell at him saying I've had enough. Give me my RMA # now or else you'll be hearing from my lawyer. Manager relents and finally gives me the RMA number.
Summary: The features on this product are awesome. But they have serious issues with quality and secondly, they do NOT know how to do business in the US. They have no understanding of how to treat customers. My guess is they're foreign and don't understand how to do business in the US. You don't make your customers do the work of your quality control engineers. Sheesh. What a nightmare.
