About a month ago, Gamers Nexus outed Asus for some pretty egregious problems with its customer service, and now the company is promising a bunch of fixes and improvements to its warranty system.
First on the list is a promise to reprocess prior Return Merchandise Authorizations (RMAs) with results that customers weren’t happy with. And they won’t just be reappraised by the same outsourced repair centers as before — they’ll be handled by Asus’ team directly. This applies to all Asus products, from laptops and motherboards to monitors and gaming handhelds.
To make it a little easier to get things started, Asus has provided an email template for people to fill out and a new inbox to send it to. If things go well, customers will receive refunds for unnecessary repairs and shipping costs. The company is also establishing a new support center in the U.S. that will be able to offer repair work as well as refurbished replacements.
Another key promise involves the infamous microSD card reader failures of the ROG Ally. Asus has refused to acknowledge the problem for over a year, but it will finally post a formal statement addressing the defect sometime this week — if it sticks to what it told Gamers Nexus, anyway.
These promises are a direct result of GN’s own independent investigation into Asus’ customer service and were discussed face-to-face with Asus’ head of customer service. After collecting emails from over 100 customers who had bad experiences trying to get in-warranty repairs, GN decided to send in its own ROG Ally that was suffering from a dodgy left joystick under a pseudonym.
Asus customer service came to the conclusion that the damage was customer-induced and that a cosmetic dent on the casing meant that GN needed to pay almost $200 to have the entire LCD screen replaced in order to remove the dent. Unsurprisingly, GN never mentioned the dent to start with and didn’t care about having it fixed — just like the majority of real customers wouldn’t.
The whole thing seemed like a very obvious ploy to change the RMA from an in-warranty to an out-of-warranty repair so Asus could charge for the work and the shipping. What’s more, the customer service communications pressured customers to pay by using confusing deadlines and implying that units could be sent back unrepaired and dissembled if the invoice wasn’t settled.
After such an experience, it’s no wonder that Gamers Nexus says it isn’t just taking Asus at its word. According to the editor-in-chief, they already have more devices in Asus’ RMA centers so they can assess whether these improvements are effective and permanent.
