Tech Goes Wrong — It’s Inevitable
I’ve grown up in a truly golden age of technical innovation and continuous improvement. We had a rented colour TV soon after they became available, sometime around 1969. I had a Super 8 cine camera and a home editor when I was 10, and even had a portable music centre (turntable, cassette deck, radio and speakers that packed up into a small briefcase-type affair) by the time I was listening to prog in the 1970s (one of the first albums I ever bought was Rick Wakeman’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, in 1974). I was a bit late getting into computers — never having touched one until I went to university in 1980, and then went a bit mad, and have been ever since. If my mum hadn’t moved soon after I graduated and I’d left home myself, some of those old gadgets would probably still be lurking in my spare room today! Because I really look after my kit. I’m mortified if I even get a barely visible scratch on something (I know it’s there, and that’s bad for me!). I cringe when I see friends or colleagues with a phone that’s got a smashed-up screen or a dent in a laptop.
But it’s a fact that tech goes wrong from time to time, no matter how careful you are. Sometimes it’s cosmetic, and there’s not much you can do about it. Sometimes, it’s an expensive (but fairly painless fix), like a replacement screen for a phone. But just occasionally, it’s something more fatal — a sealed unit that simply stops working, and you have no idea why.
In our ‘take everything for granted’ and ‘next day delivery world, we no longer have to wait weeks for our new toys to arrive. Sometimes, even big toys can be picked up in-store and be home and set up before lunch is on the table. That still doesn’t lessen the anticipation and excitement of having something new to play with, and even the fact that broken tech can often be fixed in as short a time, this does nothing to dampen the abject misery of tech that stops working completely.
While I was in the UK earlier this year, I saw an advert for a range of iPhone camera accessories from a company called ShiftCam. These included a selfie stick, a camera grip and a ring light, all of which could be attached to newer models of the iPhone using the MagSafe connection. I got really excited about the grip and light and placed an order for next-day delivery. They arrived at around eight o’clock the next evening, and it didn’t take long to have them both attached to the phone and to go into David Bailey mode and terrify the cat with portraits and selfies. I retired to bed a little later, pleased as punch with my new purchases, having left them charging on my high-tech desk, ready for my next adventure.
It became automatic to slip the camera grip into my inside pocket whenever I went out. You might not think that something as simple as this would make much difference to the quality of a photo, but I do suffer from slightly shaky hands at times, and this really did improve the sharpness of some of my shots in darker conditions. The grip also doubles up as a charger, so it meant I could leave the spare battery pack at home on longer days out.
All was well until we had a trip out to Calke Abbey on my final Sunday before returning to Prague. We were sitting in a bird hide watching a hysterical group of goldfinches, blue tits, bullfinches, chaffinches and goldcrests, and I took out my phone, snapped the grip on and tried shooting some video. Nothing happened. I checked the Bluetooth connection — nothing. I checked the battery (which had been fully charged the day before) — nothing. You know that sinking feeling you get when your favourite new toy isn’t behaving itself? I made the most of the afternoon and did get some wonderful photos, but — true to Einstein’s definition of stupidity, I kept snapping the grip back onto the phone to see if it had miraculously started working again. It never did.
I couldn’t wait to get home and try and figure out what was wrong. Maybe I’d left the power on, and the battery was drained, and it just needed charging again. Yes, of course, that was the most likely thing. Stupid me! Except, on plugging the grip into the power, nothing happened. No lights, no heat, just a dumb blue unit that wasn’t playing. Naturally, I went back into Einstein Stupid mode and used a different cable, a different charger, a different power outlet and all kinds of combinations, but this was as dead as the Norwegian Blue Parrot in the Monty Python sketch. It had shuffled off its mortal charging coil, so to speak.
But — here’s where what happens next is important. I contacted the manufacturers, who are based in Hong Kong, I believe. I’m not sure how optimistic I was at this stage. You get like that with some of these companies. I reported the fault, submitted a warranty claim, and went to bed. By the next morning, I’d received a couple of emails, including an acknowledgement of the warranty claim and a request for some more details about the purchase and the problem. Over the next week, I was in regular contact with Angelica from the ShiftCam Customer Relations Team, who couldn’t have been more helpful or tried any harder. We arranged that they would send me return labels for me to send the package back to them, and they would ship a new camera grip on receipt. Unfortunately, things weren’t going to be that easy, and the first set of labels was rejected at the FedEx point. So was the second set they sent me. On both occasions, the problem was “Shipment does not have digital clearance”, but no other help was forthcoming. I suspect it may have been because there is a Lithium battery in the product, and there was no label with a warning about that.
In the end, in desperation, I checked with Amazon, where I’d made the original purchase, and the return window was still open…Just. So I made the arrangements to have the package returned to Amazon and let them deal with it and then refund me. I confirmed with Angelica, and she agreed it was going to be the easiest option. A few days later, the refund was in my account after they’d received the return.
I’d been back in Prague while all this was going on, and my long-suffering fiancée dealt with all the physical aspects of the package from the UK. If I’d tried doing it here, I suspect the whole thing would be at the bottom of a lake by now.
When you have a product that you’re really pleased with, but it stops working, there’s always a temptation never to buy from that manufacturer again. But ShiftCam tried really hard to resolve the problem, so I bought a replacement in Prague (£10 cheaper to boot!), which, fingers crossed, hasn’t had any problems. They have a satisfied customer, and I’m happy to recommend their products. I’ll write up a review of the SnapGrip and SnapLight in another post.
The moral of the story — if you treat your customers as people and work hard to meet their needs, you’ll win more business. Tech does go wrong, but how you manage the situation with a disappointed customer is probably far more important than anything else in the sales chain.
I am a semi-retired independent management consultant specialising in organisational change management and better Ways of Working. I’m from the UK but based in Prague in the Czech Republic. I mainly write about developing better ways of working, working in the Apple ecosystem, and my adopted home in Prague. I’m still fairly new to Medium (so please be gentle with me!), but if you’ve enjoyed this, please check out some of my other articles or even follow me if you’d like to be notified when I publish new material