Netgear has the worst customer service in the world
Correction: Netgear has NO customer service. I have never in my 50 years of working in IT ( yes, I started with punch cards) experienced such a disgraceful set up as Netgear Customer Service.
A brief outline so you will never risk buying a NETGEAR product and have to experience what I went through today. Being long retired I have taken to amusing myself by making my home as “smart” as possible. For my latest project I thought I would buy a Wifi Extender to make sure Google Home could reach the smart plug I had incorporated. So, no heavy streaming etc one command and away we go. I decided on the Netgear WN3000RP because a) it was a mid range price and b) the name Netgear.
I set it up quite quickly and connected my ipad, no problem there, one slight problem...no internet. Step one is always a Google search and lo and behold page after page of posts. Unfortunately they suggested quite advanced router configurations, well..no thank you! I will contact Netgear Support.
Oh no you won’t! There are no phone number or email contacts, firstly you have to register your product, should be easy if a little annoying. Easy? no, impossible....
I had registered my email address and a password ending in “?” when setting up the extender, guess what? I couldn’t use that to register my product as the site doesn’t accept “?” as a valid character. Let’s try a different password guess what? I couldn’t do that because my email address was already registered. Off I go to Outlook and set up a dummy email address and try again. This time I access the site and try the automated registration service, of course I should have realised that a Brit saying “L” sounds just like an “O”. Thank goodness Netgear had nothing to do with developing Google Home or nothing would ever happen.
I finally, manually, made a tiny bit of progress, or so I thought, until after completing loads of bumpf, up pops “ submit proof of purchase” whaaaaaaaaaat? So, take a screen shot of my receipt convert to PDF and back to registration. How do you upload it? No idea so gave up.
I then changed tack and discovered the U.K. head office number on Google. This was 16.00.
Option 1 Tech Support ......rang for 15 minutes, no answer, no message, no muzak
Option 2 Do you want to buy one of our products......same result.
Option 3 any other queries.......same result.
By this time I was tearing out what little hair I have left in handfuls so I left option 2 ringing while I did some gardening. 45 minutes later I gave up took the extender back to the store and bought a cheap BT one for £5 less. 15 minutes after getting home my new project was complete.
I may not have come across as too angry about all this but that’s because several hours and two glasses of wine have passed. This was really, really atrocious, even getting on here tonight took several attempts at resetting passwords and changing email addresses, this is a warning.
Never buy Netgear unless you are a networking genius and even then they don’t deserve your support if they treat the rest of the public with such arrogant disdain.
Re: Netgear has the worst customer service in the world
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