I recently got a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014, in fact, I got it for Christmas as a present from my awesome wife. I plan on using the tablet as a replacement for my laptop as that’s on it’s last legs and I’m not quite ready to build a PC. I’ll be doing that for my gaming and other stuff, but in the mean time a tablet is going to fit my needs for blogging, watching streaming video, surfing the web, and even a lot of gaming. 

The thing about blogging, is that you really need a keyboard to be able to be efficient at writing. So, I bought a blue tooth keyboard so I can do my writing. Combined, this was a pretty sweet set up. When I was typing it worked pretty much perfectly, however, as I started to use my tablet more for this, I was having blue tooth issues, figured it out about 2 days later. So I talk to support after doing a lot of investigation myself, including reverting to factory settings, and eventually figured out that my blue tooth would drop whenever I switched applications. That’s clearly not acceptable as the tablet is designed for a user to have multiple windows open at the same time and multi-tasking. 

So, I contacted support and they requested that I send my tablet into to get fixed. I sent my tablet in on the 28th and I didn’t hear anything from Samsung until 1/8/2014 when the tablet was repaired. I still haven’t gotten my tablet back. Apparently the label to return the tablet to me was created on 1/11/2014 and still hasn’t shipped out 2 days later. 

Samsung should be concerned the long term impact on their business. I’m probably early as someone that will fully replace a laptop with a tablet, but still rather late to the tablet game as a consumer. Samsung is competing with both Amazon, Google, and Apple for best tablet. Amazon has a fantastic track record with customer service for the products they have full control over. Apple has really good support as well. Google, from my understanding, is also excellent. To this point Samsung has been able to rely on their cell phone providers to provide customer service for their devices, now it’s incumbent upon them to properly manage their customers when they have issues.

What I wanted as a customer in this case was pretty simple, clear expected delivery date to Samsung’s repair facility, clear report on the problem as well as how to deal with the problem if I ever have to do a factory reset, fast turn around time on sending my tablet back to me. At this point I’ve gone much longer without my table than with it.

I’ve had issues with Amazon’s products in the past, my Kindle broke while I was flying and it was well out of warranty. What happened with that, they told me if I paid $50 and sent them my broken Kindle they would replace it. In fact, they actually shipped me a new one and asked me to use that box to return my other one. This worked really well and allowed me to get my Kindle back faster and the customer reps made it very clear what was going on.

How Samsung could have made this better.

1. Provide Tracking Number for my tablet to Samsung’s repair
2. Failure analysis with a way of ensuring that I wouldn’t never have this problem again
3. Shipping my tablet out the very next day from their repair facility to me. It’s been 5 days and the Tablet hasn’t shipped yet.
4. More information on their service tracking website.

I’ve been extremely disappointed in this service experience. If this problem isn’t resolved, I’m going to be returning the product and likely will not return to the Samsung ecosystem in the future. The great product I bought has been pretty well tainted by their horrible customer service. 

Also, Samsung also asked me to review their service before I got my product back. Talk about tone deafness. Samsung needs to fix this otherwise they will not be able to compete especially with these extremely strong customer service companies in Google, Apple, and Amazon. Great products won’t matter because Laptops will be replaced with tablets and tablets need different levels of manufacturing support than laptops.