Kobo customer support has been heralded by many people to be abysmal and if our blog is any indication on the poor service, it is hurting. Readers of our blog have responded that they experience sometimes an hour or more of wait time and in some cases are disconnected randomly. Support right now is outsourced to India and many of the 1st and 2nd tier support staff have no experience with the Kobo line of e-readers or the Vox. This results in customers becoming more irate, waiting an hour to talk to someone and then not resolving their questions. Finally, we hear that people end up being told they will receive email responses from the technical support department and never do. Kobo has now responded to these issues and promised swift action to overhaul their customer service department.
Mark Stevens, the Kobo VP of Customer Care issued the following statement today. “In order to keep pace with our rapid growth and to provide a more global support model across many products, countries and languages, we recently made a number of changes to our customer support infrastructure. We expect that these changes, when complete will allow us to serve more readers, with a higher quality of service around the world.
The transition to our new platform has caused challenges for some of our customers resulting in longer phone wait times, and delayed email responses. We have been working diligently to identify the problems and resolve them to reach the level of service our customers expect. As a result, we expect to see significant improvement in response times within the next week. While the world of eReading is a rapidly changing one, ultimately our goal is to make it easy for you to get your questions answered quickly and to take technology out of the equation so you can focus on your reading enjoyment.”
It is about time Kobo revised its customer support and there is no other details as of yet. We have an interview lined up with the VP of Customer Care in the next few days to iron out the details. It seems this is one of the things that are coming down from Rakuten, the Japanese E-Commerce giant that purchased Canadian based Kobo last month. If anything, the users who have e-readers and will receive them for the holidays will hopefully see elevated support soon.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
