Warranty repair sez U pay for shipping of defective product! OK when it works iRobot Roomba 560 Robotic Vacuum
My Robot Roomba Rocks iRobot Roomba 4105 Bagless Robotic Vacuum I use my Roomba atleast 3 times a week. I have pergo floors. The Roomba s...
Roomba: A new Member of our Family iRobot Roomba 560 Robotic Vacuum We got this Roomba to replace an older model and we just love her. HER, yes...
OK. I’ve wanted to get this thing for a long time, and finally broke down and bought it. I figured I’d given iRobot Corp. a chance to impress me.
As you may have read from my previous review, customer support and reliability is *the* most important proof of the pudding of a good product, because, after all, if a cool product doesn’t work, and it’s expensive and a hassle to get it fixed . . . who wants THAT? My old vacuum, while an expenditure of time, is cheap and it has worked for over a decade(!).
Well, on the crucial tests of reliability and support, iRobot gets a “D ” from me, which pretty much totally outweighs the “A” I’d give it for functionality and cleverness.
OK. First the positive stuff. I was really impressed with how easy and quick it was to set up right out of the box! The enclosure opens like a styrofoam briefcase to reveal only a small number of components, virtually no assembly, and ridiculously easy-to-follow instructions. The thing is both stylish (basic black and streamlined) and disarmingly cute and charming in the silly musical notes it plays to announce itself, and in the way it moves about. Programming it only took about 5 minutes.
The next morning, after its initial charge-up, the thing was scuttling about doing a remarkably thorough job of cleaning its way through my wood floors and assorted small rugs, and even handled significant changes in gradient from my dining to my kitchen floor. I do need to point out that the poor thing didn’t handle the tangle of wires under my computer desk terribly well (I admit it, my wiring is expeditious and effective, not pretty). It tended to get stuck there, so I had to address the problem by lifting the wires onto a stool so the unit could wander about in the area safely. Otherwise, the unit was quite fearless . . . even chasing dust bunnies under beds and couches, and emerging victorious.
At this point I need to comment on another reviewer’s opinion regarding this product’s cleaning effectiveness. The end result is what matters, and the means by which this product achieves its success, is not by being hyper efficient in one pass, but by its sheer persistence. While it is true that the roomba 560 is relatively unsuccessful in picking up dirt on its first run over an area, it is very clear that this is not the product’s design strategy: The roomba 560 is *not* designed to achieve its goal within one pass, but rather, its tactic is to go over, and over, and over the same areas. In the end, my floor not only got clean, but we were amazed at how much the thing was able to accumulate in its dust receptacle, given that we thought the floor was already pretty clean. The thing really works! I suppose in a perfect world it would be nice if it could achieve perfect pick up the first time, and complete its job in 5 minutes instead of 30 or 45.
Maybe this is why one reviewer was unhappy — perhaps they checked the unit’s cleaning results within the time-span of what a human would take to clean with a big-ole sucking vacuum cleaner, and were dissatisfied. Personally, though, I think the trade-off of a longer time to do the job (in exchange for clean floors we don’t have to take time-off to personally achieve) is perfectly acceptable, and here is why: Most of us are gone from the house for long stretches of time during any given day, and we could care less what happens or how long it takes to happen while we are out of the house. When we return, if the floors are clean, what do we care if it secretly took the roomba an hour — it might as well be 5 minutes for all we know! If the floors are clean, and the product is timed/programmed to do its lengthy job on its own when it is not underfoot, then fantastic.
OK. Now for the bad stuff.
On the first day of operation, post-charge-up, not long after we allowed the unit to do its first cleaning, we noticed it was having problems finding its docking station. Curious as to whether the problem had to do with distance from the station (e.g. had the unit “strayed” out of radio-range?), I put it directly in front of the station, and pressed the “Dock” button. The poor thing kept trying to get into the dock, and wiggle into position, repeatedly, but just never seemed to succeed, and kept backing off and re-trying. The night before it had worked perfectly.
I tried phoning customer service. All I got was the endless menu options that had nothing to do with getting technical support on the functionality of the product. After about 10 minutes of irrelevant options, it seemed to me I there simply *was* no human staffing the phones! It was all an idiot-automated system with no humans. I even tried calling back and pressing nothing, to see if a human came on, and it just kept repeating the options. Then I called back and tried pressing “0″ (to hopefully get an operator), but the automated system scolded me for pressing something that was not one of the acceptable options.
This is a huge demerit against iRobot, as a company. Granted, companies across the board are trying to find efficiencies of cost to increase profits . . . or even just to stay in business during these difficult times. Having a well-designed phone menu system is part of such an efficiency, and I don’t usually have an issue with navigating through one, provided it is sensible and actually supplies me with what I need, AND provided it can ultimately lead to a real person if the menu options don’t serve my needs — even a real person in Bangalore would be appreciated, if I can understand what they say, and they can actually help me, rather than parrot hackneyed, non-problem-solving corporate psycho-mumble.
iRobot’s corporate decision to completely eliminate any possibility of human phone interaction (or hide such an option so effectively within a menu, as to have the same result), in my book, crosses the line. If we were dealing with junk from a 99-cent store, then I can see that the company might do something like that. But the Roomba is a luxury item, in the same league as a personal computer. Complete elimination of human interface via phone support is a serious fault — simply unacceptable.
After my failure to get results by phone, I contacted the company via its email option. I provided detailed information on the troubleshooting I had done, and hoped for the best. Given my experience with phone support, I expected to go through days or even a week of lengthy, inconclusive email exchanges where the email support person would clearly not be reading my responses.
Here I was mildly, but pleasantly, surprised. Not two hours after sending the email, I got a response. True, it was clear that the email-support person had not read my email carefully, and true, all he did was send me a rote instruction reply, but heck, just getting back to me as quickly as they did counts for something.
Despite the fact I had already done much of the troubleshooting previously, I repeated the instructions provided in the email, and reported back. Again, within a very short time, the email support person replied, giving me further troubleshooting instructions, which, again, I complied with, and reported back with the results (nothing they asked me to do fixed the problem).
It was at this point that iRobot really let me down. The next day, I got an automated reply, saying (in a nutshell) that the unit would be replaced under warranty, but leaving it to me (and my own wallet) to cover the cost of shipping back to the RMA department, from California, all the way to New York state!
So here I am, buying a luxury item, finding it defective within 24 hours out of the box, and on top of paying the purchase cost, I also have to pay to ship this heavy gadget all the way across the country (they even recommended I use the pricier UPS, rather than the post office! Cheeky!). That sure was an unforeseen extra cost to the product — one that potential buyers of any Roomba better budget for!
Bottom line: Because of the perverse lack of any human voice interface, and because they stick it to you for the RMA return shipping costs, iRobot deserves an “F” for customer service. However, this is mitigated slightly by the fairly rapid, if impersonal and by-rote, email technical support, so I give them a “D“.
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UPDATE:
I am updating my rating from a “D” to a “B+” and here is why:
I sent an email to their support people, complaining about having to pay to ship the RMA return. To my surprise, they just emailed me with a UPS shipping label: They have agreed to pay for the return!
Had they done this from the get-go, I’d have given them an “A-” for support (I still think that their lack of human interface in their phone system keeps them from getting an “A+” for support). I had to work for it and complain and that ain’t right. But they did cover the cost when I squawked, so that deserved a vastly improved support rating in my book.
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