Motorola’s Warranty and Replacement Service is Taking a Beating Right Now, Got a Story to Share? (Updated)

Yesterday afternoon, this reddit thread picked up a whole bunch of steam after the original poster shared his story on how he believes Motorola’s customer service has become a disaster within recent months. He links to forum threads and customer complaint sites to show that he is not alone and even gets a bunch of redditors to weigh in with similar stories.

The basics of the whole fiasco are that Motorola, depending on the device, isn’t able to issue warranty replacements and are leaving people without phones and watches for months at a time. That’s not a good look. It’s 2016 and most of us can’t go hours without our phones let alone days or weeks or months.

Now, we often hesitate about reporting on these types of stories, because customer complaint boards are just that – customer complaint boards. When people are satisfied with products, they aren’t going to spend time on complaint boards telling the world how great companies are. When they have a complaint, you know they will be there within minutes to express their frustration. These places almost always show companies in a bad light. With that said, something feels different about this situation. 

I’ve spent a good deal of time (more than any human should) this morning looking through complaint boards and Motorola’s own forums trying to look for patterns or see if there is a serious issue here. I’ll just say this – it doesn’t take long to see that Motorola customers are flooding to multiple areas of the internet to voice their frustrations over warranty returns and replacements.

Now, so you know, I also took a look at Samsung, LG, and HTC boards to see if they are filled with similar-styled complaints. They aren’t. The complaint boards from those companies are all over the place with issues, but they often deal with lower-end phones or 2-year old phones that people are now having issues with. That’s not to say that those aren’t valid complaints, but if you spend 2 minutes looking at Motorola-related complaints, you see almost nothing but issues with their new products, namely the Moto X Pure Edition and the lack of replacements.

Our inbox has also seen a couple of emails from our readers who have dealt with issues getting replacements, like this one from Ryan J.:

I have had the absolute worst customer service experience and have chronicled most of it. Just got off the phone with their “Repair Escalation Team” and they literally have NO devices to swap out for my exchange supposedly.

Others in the reddit thread are sharing similar stories, where they have spent hours on the phone with Motorola, only to be told that they simply do not have phones available at this time, but that they hope to within a few days. Those days keep turning into weeks and then into months.

Here is someone whose replacement took more than 70 days. Here is another that has been going on for a month or more. This one called it “purgatory” and said that at least two replacements were broken phones when they arrived.

I don’t know Motorola’s situation, obviously, but not having phones available for replacement in their warranty program is not exactly acceptable. Sending out broken phones as replacements is even worse.

If you have a Motorola support story, we would love to hear it – both good and bad. Keep in mind that this isn’t a post created to attack Motorola. But we do think we have one of the strongest and loyalist Motorola communities on the planet here and probably have a number of readers who could shed some light on this potentially unfortunate situation.

Let’s hear it.

UPDATE: Motorola has issued us the following statement. In it, they confirm the delays, apologize, and mention how they are working to implement solutions. They even admitted that “this is not up to our standard of excellence.”

We’re experiencing delays at our US repair center that is influencing repair times for some customers. We know how important it is for you to get your phone back as quickly as possible so we’re working hard to identify and implement solutions. We are dedicated to the highest quality service and this is not up to our standard of excellence. We deeply apologize for any inconvenience this situation has caused.

If you are currently having an issue with warranty fulfillment, please contact us at 888-355-8422. We are available Monday through Friday from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM, or on Saturday and Sunday from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM Eastern Time.