Particle won't ship a replacement antenna to me because of my name

[Ahmed_Spero]

Update:

Hi everyone,

thanks in part to Kenneth, I was contacted by Particle support and we realized there was a misunderstanding over this whole thing. Without going into detail, they were very responsive and will be dispatching my replacement antenna soon.

Thank you to those who helped and this experience has not changed my opinion of Particle. I am still a loyal customer

---

Dear fellow Particle community members,

I know this isn’t a technical question but I just got an email from Particle that left me quite shocked and I want the community to know about it.

A couple of months ago, I bought two 2G Electrons from Adafruit which work fine but the antenna on one of them was faulty. I emailed Particle to ask for a replacement and they politely and promptly arranged to ship me a replacement. Two weeks of radio silence later, I email them asking for an update about the antenna, and four days later, this is the response I get:

[Removed]

And they closed the ticket.

So without giving me a chance to explain that my name (first and last, which is what they asked me for) is an extremely common name is a very unstable region full of suspected terrorists and criminals, they shut the door in my face. At least at airports they pick up the phone and clarify the person’s full name, but in Particle’s case, they couldn’t be bothered.

Not only that, I did a search of people on the EU sanctions list and the last name of the closest match only phonetically sounds like mine.

Add to all that the fact that I am a resident of Canada and not the EU…

On what planet can you call this good customer service? I have bought $250 worth of Particle equipment, supported their kickstarter, recommended them to friends…I am an upstanding member of society actually trying to use Electrons to help farmers in a poor country…this is the service I get, just for committing the heinous crime of having a common Arab name.

I really don’t know what to think anymore. I had an order of 50 Electrons lined up for my Nepal project but now what…

I would appreciate any advice from you guys. Thank you.

[kennethlimcp]

Hello @Ahmed_Spero, thank you for reaching out!

Let me ping @KyleG and see what can be done.

[kmmonk]

Hi Ahmed,

I’d like to follow up with this since you’ve mentioned a few things that are not entirely accurate. First of all, if you’re going to screenshot my message, please screenshot my entire reply. As you can see, I made sure that if you had questions about any of this, I was available to help figure things out or answer any of your questions.

In addition to this, your ticket wasn’t closed. When we send a ticket or reply to anyone, unless it’s 100% clear that the conversation is finished, we put it in a state called “Pending”, which essentially sends our message to the customer and will also remind them at 2 days and 5 days that we’re waiting on a reply and if we don’t hear back, the ticket will automatically close.

Your ticket came in on Friday, October 6th and @KyleG replied to you on Tuesday, October 10th (since our offices were closed on Monday the 9th.) Your replacement was entered into our system on October 11th and I received a message from my warehouse on October 18th about it being flagged in their system. I sent the message to you on October 18th and have not heard back from you, hence why your ticket automatically was set to solved (since its past 5 days without a response). It’s still in a state where you can reply to it, but again, I haven’t heard anything from you until today where I see that you sent in 2 new tickets a couple of hours ago.

I’m not sure where [quote=“Ahmed_Spero, post:1, topic:36930”]
Two weeks of radio silence later
[/quote]

is coming from.

I’d love to work with you about this and figure out the situation. Our systems didn’t bring anything up until it got to our warehouse, where it was flagged in their system, which in turn, they relayed that information to us. The information that I was provided actually matched your first and last name exactly, which is why this was flagged.

I apologize that I gave you the impression that we shut the door in your face. That’s very much not the case here. I’m happy to work with you to get this figured out and make sure that you can get that replacement antenna as well as any orders you’d like to place in the future.

You can either reply directly to that ticket (since it’s still in a state where you can reply), you can email me directly at kevin@particle.io, you can DM me here, or I can reply directly to your new tickets, whichever you prefer.

I look forward to hearing from you and resolving this issue! Again, I’m sorry that you had a negative experience with Particle and myself. I’m going to contact our logistics company and work with them about orders that get flagged and what we should do going forward so this doesn’t happen to you or anyone else again.

Thanks,
Kevin