Caught Between UPS and Seagate (or When Good Customer Support Agents Take Flack for Bad Processes)

As a I sit in the chat queue, waiting to see if Seagate will help me for the second time in two days, I felt the need to write. This is another one of my pet peeves, having been a BA and Project Manager in the past – bad processes and when they intersect between two major companies.

This all started on December 22 when I settled in to play Fallout and the harddrive refused to work. I called Seagate and spoke to a support rep that after getting a screenshot of the results from my PC declared the external drive dead and assisted with an RMA. A bit delayed because Christmas, we shipped the drive back to Seagate using a supplied UPS shipping label and waited. I got the confirmation that the package had arrived in Ontario from Edmonton on January 9th, well within the 30 day window for the return, but by January 12th I still didn’t see any indication that Seagate had the drive. On January 15th I was on the phone.

The girl at Seagate warranty was extremely nice, but when I gave her the only confirmation I had…

… I was advised that that wasn’t good enough. The UPS driver had not gotten a photo (which is the correct process that should have been followed) so I would beed to reach out to UPS and get them to send me more documentation.

I then did as asked and reached out to UPS. Unfortunately their chat agents are NOT actual support agents but instead tech support for their website. Not helpful. So I called them and spoke to a girl for which English was her second language (not the issue) but her comprehension of what I was asking for and why seemed to be the actual problem. We had at that point however agreed that she would email me the document that Seagate required in order to do something for my lost defunct hard-drive.

Now remember I am working under a Seagate mandated time frame. The drive had to be back to them within 30 days of issuing the RMA.

So when no email arrived with the document from UPS, today (January 16th) I was on the phone again. Again for about 30 mins. Again a girl promised to email me the document I needed. Again 15 minutes after getting off the phone I still did not have the document.

This time I thought I guess I better submit a claim to UPS for the cost of the drive because it seems that sending me an email was too much to expect.

Now the UPS site refused to let me submit the claim – even though I have a UPS account with a credit card attached that they could send the claim through to I get this screen whenever I try to submit…

… To be clear there is no ‘Payment Options’ on the upper right corner of the screen and the Payment Options on my account are set.

During this time the email promised by UPS finally arrived.

I’m not even worried about the misspelt name, I was just glad that I had the paperwork they wanted. Though the only difference between it and the one available online seemed to be this…

Now it was back to chat with Seagate to talk to a lovely girl named, Carol.

Carol was able to find all the information I had shared with Nicole; the first Seagate Warranty Support girl; so I didn’t have to repeat myself – though another annoyance/failure of technology is that the Seagate Support folk could not open a PDF. Instead I had to open the document and take a screenshot.

Carol was able to escalate the issue to the next tier of Seagate support, though I am now again waiting for 2 to 3 days with no firm answer.

So at this point if I was a BA writing up a report on this incident, I would identify these points as ‘improvements’ to address…

1. Ensure that a photo of delivery is taken on BOTH sides of the delivery process – both Seagate AND UPS should be taking pictures, not just one or the other.
2. Do not use your customer as the middle man to address issues – take ownership of the situation – especially since Seagate SUPPLIED the paid delivery of the failed drive to them. This should be SEAMLESS to the customer.
3. UPS ensure that your website and your chat support works and sends customers to their right areas of your site. Ensure that instructions are easily followed.
4. Make certain customers can reach a Manager/Team lead to address issues.
5. If a customer brings forth an issue, any countdowns like the 30 day timeframe for an RMA should be paused.

Right now, I do not have a solid resolution to my problem. I am still waiting for Seagate to decide what to do and I still have not followed up with UPS to put in a claim (due to their site not working as expected).

It leaves me wondering was it worth it? Was paying the extra money to get a hard drive from a reputable company worth it? Or would I have been better off buying a cheap drive off of Temu or AliExpress or even a less name brand drive that I wouldn’t have even bother trying to replace via the warranty and instead thrown it in the recycling bin?

I’m starting to lean towards the cheap option and that should worry companies like UPS (who does not deliver for Temu/AliExpress or Amazon) and Seagate.