How bad can customer support be?

I telephoned Netgear Customer Service for the first time yesterday and it was a futile and frustrating experience.  The reps were not native English speakers.  They had trouble understanding me and I had trouble understanding them.  They were clueless on resolving the problem, which turned out to be a Netgear problem ultimately resolved by an Xfinity tech who came to my house today.

In the past I purchased 2 Netgear routers and both worked well and were easy to install.  The installation manual instructions on this one were more complicated and less clear.  After setting the router up and activating with Xfinity I could not get apps on my previously functioning Roku to load.  Two different Roku sticks told me the download speed was poor.  Three times I called Netgear customer service and 3 times they referred me to either Roku or Xfinity.  During the second call, the Netgear woman told me that my Roku was malfunctioning because the MAC number on the Roku did not match the MAC number on the Netgear Router.  She told me it was still connected to my previous (now disconnected) router and it was a Roku problem.   Since every device has its own unique MAC number, this was completely wrong.  She either didn't know much or she wanted to pass the problem on to someone else.

It turns out that the problem was related to not completely registering some information with Netgear.   I assumed that all information had been registered by the first agent who was "helping" me and asking me a lot of questions in regard to registration.  I still don't understand exactly what I was supposed to do in regard to registration, but Xfinity has fixed it.  Netgear was useless.

Even though I have liked the quality of Netgear products over the years, this is the last one I will buy.  The set up has become too complicated and the instructions are too hard to follow.  There is nowhere to get competent help from Netgear.  A few months ago I returned a new Netgear Wifi extender because I followed the instructions but could not get it to connect to the router.  I didn't want to deal with the frustration of calling customer service so just returned it.   It is too bad that they make a good product but don't know how to make it user friendly for the average consumer.