Worst Customer Support in History - RMA #: 1047391

Gather round friends, as I tell you the tale of my NV+, and my attempts to overcome the villains that stand in the way of me and a working product.

On Monday, I finally got the hard drives to put into my new nas box. Giggling like a schoolgirl, I expected everything to go smoothly like with the first NV+ I bought. Unfortunately, trouble awaited me.

Standing before me was not another happy silver friend, but it's evil twin. Awaiting me was a box with 2 solid green lights, and a flashing power button.

I tried all I could to get it to behave. Resets didn't work. Flashing the firmware resulted in no success. I decided to make a call to the fabled land of Technical Support.

It started out simply enough. Asking for the serial number of the box in order to register it to receive support. A minor nuisance, but an understandable one. Confirming my name letter by letter and my e-mail the same way? That's fine too. It's good for them to be accurate.

Unfortunately, this poor individual could not help me. After holding for a while, I was transferred to a second purveyor of service, asking me for my support ticket number. While the process of having agents slowly spell out my name and e-mail every time I was transferred was getting tedious... I could handle this. An hour and three levels of support later, I received an RMA.

"Huzzah!" I thought. Until I realized that Netgear's policy is to make me pay for the shipping of their defective product. Nothing says "Customer Service" better than "Hey... sorry our product sucked and you've had to deal with this. How about paying some more money to get the product you wanted?"

I begrudgingly paid for shipping, and today arrived my new NAS box.

I transferred the drives and plugged it in. I noticed there was no power switch on the back of it like there was on my old one. I assumed the power button on the front was all that was needed now. Apparently not.

After thinking to myself "Am I really this dumb I can't turn on a NAS box?" I called tech support again. I had a very simple question. "How do I turn on an NV+ without a power switch on the back?"

I called in, and after asking if this is my first time calling, asked for a support number. While I couldn't find that, I said I had an RMA number. The agent apparently looked it up.

"That's not an RMA number" she said.

Perhaps she misheard me. I asked her to repeat the number, and I confirmed it. I looked at what Netgear sent in my e-mail. I looked at what was in the documentation they shipped with the new box. It was definitely an RMA number.

"It's not an RMA number" she again said.

She asked for the serial number. I gave that to her.

"Okay, I see you haven't registered the box. We'll have to set you up an account."

Oh, but I did register it. I registered it a mere two days prior. I have e-mails for that too.

"I have a very simple question, does the serial number really matter?"
"I can't provide you support until you register your product"
"It is registered."
"No it's not."
"Okay, well... I went through this whole process two days ago so I'm not in the mood to do it again. I'm going to hang up and hopefully get a new agent."

...my frustration was starting to show.

I call back, and go through the same process as Monday, only this time with a MUCH simpler question. Again, three levels of support. Again, totalling over an hour. Again, I can deal with that. You know that whole "cherry on top" metaphor? Well, whatever it is you'd put on a large steaming pile to top it off was about to come.

"The power supplies aren't compatible. The cord from your old one won't work with the new one."

Simple enough. Annoying that Netgear would neglect to send me a power cord if they were going to send me a unit with a different power supply. I was just hoping they wouldn't charge me for shipping to send the new one due to their oversight.

"You'll have to swap out the power supplies"

...I'm sorry?

"Can't Netgear just send me the proper cord to go along with the power supply they sent with the new NV+?" I asked.

"No. It says here there was a problem with your chassis, not with the power supply. So we only provide the chassis. You'll have to switch out the power supply."

Seriously? With no other product in the world that I can think of would this be required of customers. While I'm sure I can probably handle this replacement, it's not just presumptuous to assume that customers are able to switch out power supplies, but downright arrogant to have a mistake on Netgear's part and then force the customer to use their time to fix it.

I'm not sure if anyone at Netgear reads this board or if it's just helpful people who own netgear products trying to help others with problems since obviously Netgear themselves aren't going to do it. But I'm hoping there's at least someone in the company who would prefer the company properly stand behind their products rather than provide this shoddy level of service.