My wife purchased a brand new not refurbished marantz sr6014 from a4l as a Christmas present for me. It was defective. The replacement was also defective albeit in a different way. They didn't treat me the way I really would have liked to have been treated in dealing with it. It got even more difficult when I asked them to refund our credit card that it was purchased on. Now they eventually did the right thing but I had to strong-arm them a little into it. I believe I was dealing with a subordinate and once the manager got involved things went better. I would purchase from them again because they eventually did the correct thing. I do have a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth because they automatically assumed that I was doing something wrong in both cases but they couldn't figure out what was wrong either and then still assumed I had to be doing something wrong and when I prove to them I wasn't they got a little indignant...until the person that I believed to have been a manager got involved. He didn't identify himself as such. I will continue on believing that I probably got a newbie that just wasn't handling me properly because of the mostly very good reputation they have. My wife not so much.
That is disappointing to hear!
I got a Marantz SR-6001 that I thought was defective (it was my first AVR ~10 years ago) and the guy let me swap it for another. After the second one had the same problem as the first, I did more research and discovered that the AVR was fine and I was the one with the problem! They really should have asked me
more questions!
I imagine their task on returns is to follow a certain flow-chart for troubleshooting the obvious problems (like try a reset or make sure you have assigned inputs correctly). However, good customer service also involves "reading" the customer to try to understand his level of experience/patience/frustration.
I remember back when buying a computer via mail-order was a new thing and mine had a failure within the warranty period. When I called the company for service, they sent me to a technician. Once the technician established that I had built computers in the past, he started having me perform many tests. After about 4 hours (over a week as they sent parts for me to swap out on a trial and error basis) I realized that I had to just tell him that I was not willing to be their repair service, and that I wanted a replacement via the warranty. He almost sounded relieved and the response was "no problem" and they sent another unit to me right away! I went off on a little tangent there, but I learned then that often CS is partially waiting for you to tell them what you want, but if you don't, they are probably instructed to minimize the cost of the return. I think this guy was impressed at what I had already been willing to do and felt bad to be "taking advantage of me", but as was the instruction of his job, he wasn't authorized to offer me the replacement (on the call "monitored for good service") as long as I was a willing participant. I learned that day that just because I have patience doesn't mean I should always use it
This is a little bit of an off-topic ramble except that it does sound like the guy you were dealing with was inexperienced; and, it sounds likely that he had too much ego such that when you started disagreeing with him, he doubled down rather than recognizing it was time to process a return!
