I’ve been without use of my Librem 14 for well over a week now. Your policy states a target response time under 6 hours for hardware warranty issues, but for both my tickets (# 3081 and # 3279) it seems to have taken your agents between 1 and 6 days only for a simple and short reply ‒ there’s been no resolution on either of those 2 unique (non-related) tickets yet.
How does a company get away with charging $2000+ for a laptop, then immediately ignoring its customers like this?
Purism isn’t ignoring its customers; for brevity, I’ll just say that the support department is simply short-staffed at the moment. We are literally onboarding new support staff as I type this. I’ll make sure to mention your issues for review in the support sync meeting today.
When my employer is short-staffed, our support team’s response times go up. If the situation gets bad, they even exceed the internal targets that have been set.
But you publicly provide an estimated response time of “under 6 hours” and still haven’t responded in 6 days now…how do you explain that with shortstaffing? Do you really have 1 person doing the work of 10 people there? If so, most qualified business managers wouldn’t refer to that as shortstaffing. Neither could that be categorized as an unexpected occurrence.
What’s really going on? And when can I expect to get my laptop running again?
I don’t want to defent Purism since I have no idea what’s going on behind the scene. But if there is just one person less than needed the incoming support requests will grow the todo list with time. So a delay of 6+ days can happen by just one person below the required minimum.
I’ll also say that my ticket # 3279 is a routine matter that shouldn’t even need any support interaction in the first place. But there is a crucial piece of information missing from ALL your documentation, download site, repositories, bug tracker, and this forum.
Withholding that critical piece and also not providing any documentation on this routine matter surely isn’t about any staffing levels. Add to this the matter of the dubious warranty terms discussed in a separate thread.
Just terrible operations management making for even worse customer relations.
Get your stuff together, already, or you will certainly not survive too long as a company. No wonder you’re having to ask investors to pay for the operations as several months worth of inventory lie unsold.
Can you share with us what the missing information is? Maybe someone in the community forum can provide it. Even if only Purism can provide the information, the community can at least make sure that the information is subsequently available.
Purism doesn’t reliably update their website when response times or shipping times go up, nor have they reliably updated https://status.librem.one/ during a librem.one incident.
Being short staffed is likely the entirety of the delay, and not managing expectations properly is nothing new for Purism.
So, realistically, the forum post should not be estimating “under 6 hours”. That may not be what the OP wants to hear but it would at least align the forum post with reality.
I think a long term gripe may also apply as to whether that is “business hours” or “wall clock hours”. If you contact Purism for support at 5pm on a Friday afternoon (in whatever local time is applicable) and if they don’t provide 24x7 support coverage then you could easily burn 60-something hours of wall clock time before anyone could even look at the ticket. The forum post implies it is “business hours”.
I think the need to update that forum post is doubly so because “response” is not “resolution” anyway. Any company can provide an autoresponder that provides assurance that the contact has at least reached Purism (and not been blocked as spam, for example) and that will nearly always comfortably meet the goal of “response in under 6 hours” but it’s not actually solving a customer’s problem.
@JCS After weeks of waiting for your Support team to respond, I’ve just sent the following email to your CEO:
I'm reaching out to you as a last-ditch attempt to try to resolve the string of issues with my Librem 14 which have remained unresolved with your Support team for weeks now. Reference tickets #3018 and #3279
Given the
-> _*weeks*_-long response times,
-> incomplete documentation,
-> missing downloads that are necessary for regular operation, and
-> the fact that the device has not once functioned normally in the 2 months since I received it,
I am now giving all of these matters only 48 more hours to fully resolve. After that time period I will have no choice but to file a chargeback with my credit card provider for the full purchase amount. I have already connected with them about this matter. Given the trail of emails that establish Purism's warranty failures, *they have assured me of a full refund* if the matter remains unresolved any longer.
Despite Purism's notoriety for leaving its customers in the lurch, I appreciate the contributions that your company has made to various open-source projects, and this is the sole reason why I willingly spent the exorbitant amount that this laptop sells for. The fact that your company fails to stand behind these high-priced products is not only unethical, it's a violation of product warranty and consumer protection laws the world over.
I am available to discuss the matter by phone if that would ensure resolution within *48 hours*: xxx-xxx-xxxx
With best Regards,
Hmm. I bought a Librem 14 last year. I literally use it like every day. Can you share why you were not interested in answering @irvinewade’s question: Can you share with us what the missing information is?
I’m a user. I don’t know why. But in my experience, Purism response times are really slow. Whenever I interact with Purism purchases or support, I generally expect a pretty slow back and forth. When I order a laptop or phone from Purism, they end up starting the shipping to me (FedEx tracking, etc) about 2-8 weeks or something after I order it. There is some sort of delay there.
But I find the products to be enjoyable, particularly the Librem 5, which is quite unique. But to support the kind of people who use Librem 5’s, I bought this Librem 14, and I really have found myself using it almost every day as a personal machine.
Purism forums have certainly seen plenty of people describe situations similar to yours, where the forum users say they are a customer and then they say they became extremely frustrated with Purism, and it all goes downhill. But in general, Purism is unusual. And they’re the kind of unusual group that actually did make a Librem 5 and actually did ship it to me.
And the forums are pretty active. It’s difficult for me to picture what I would do if an order from Purism arrived to me and the device didn’t work – because in my case that has literally never happened – but I think in that situation, I would be open to people on the forums telling me how to fix the device, since the forums often seem very active.
Regarding ticket #3081: Support responded to you 25 September at 2:28PM PST asking you to confirm some details regarding your charging issue, to which you have not yet responded.
Regarding issue #3279: Support did send you an initial reply shortly after issue #3081. You responded to this message but support has not yet replied due to the backlog. I brought your concern to support in a meeting just now and they will be responding to you shortly.
Given the trail of emails that establish Purism’s warranty failures, they have assured me of a full refund if the matter remains unresolved any longer.
There is no evidence that a refund was promised by Purism. Are you saying that your card provider has made this claim?
@JCS I provided ALL of the information that was requested from me. Though you are welcome to present these baseless arguments in defense of the chargeback once you receive it next week. As I stated in the email to Todd, a refund in such matters has already been assured by my bank.
Two more back and forth emails with support since last night, but still no repair/RMA label. At this point I’m just watching the clock, looking forward to filing that chargeback at 5PM!
Update: Support came through on the 11th hour! I have an RMA and will be sending the device back to them for repair on Monday. Hopefully I’ll have a fully functioning device before Xmas! 
Thank you JCS, for your intervention!
@JCS It’s been 3 weeks since I sent this laptop in for warranty repair, and I’ve sent 2 emails to support since then but there’s been no updates at all.
If you cannot repair and return the original device promptly, can you send me a new one with the same specs?
I pinged the repair technicians for comment.