Here’s to Jawbone’s customer service.

As a followup to our last post on the Jawbone UP, we thought it appropriate to provide an update to our UP experience, which has unfortunately stalled. While we were among a group of users who didn’t have any notable problems with our UP, we’re now part of the class of users who have a non-functional UP band.

Our band worked fine up until a few days ago, when we noticed that the Smart Alarm would only vibrate twice before stopping. This wasn’t immediately apparent, as we first thought that perhaps, in a sleepy state, we hit the alarm off button and forgot about it, but after a couple days of missing the alarm (thankfully we were on vacation), we realized that there were only two vibration cycles before the band stopped the alarm automatically. We suspect that the software on the device was still working, as we still noticed a flashing light on the UP when the alarm went off, despite the vibrations having stopped.

We sent Jawbone customer support a message through their web site explaining the problem, and in a couple short hours later, we received a message back saying that we could reset the band by holding the band’s button while we plugged it in. The capacitors would be reset once we released the button and the band was plugged in, and hopefully this would fix our problem.

Strangely, that same day, despite our band reporting it had a 30% charge left in the morning, it died in the afternoon. We tried the reset trick that evening, and had a full charge by bed-time. The next morning, we noticed the alarm, and at first thought that the two-vibration cycle was still in effect, but after a short delay after the second vibration, the alarm continued, and we thought all was well. Happy, we continued to wear our band that day, but by late afternoon, the band again reported a low battery. So, we plugged her back in.

Unfortunately, despite a charge of two hours, the band didn’t come back on; the band continued to report a low battery, and we couldn’t even sync the band with our iPhone. In short, our band too had become a “brick”. We left the band plugged in to a power source for the rest of the night, but nothing had changed by morning.

We sent a followup e-mail to Jawbone, this time including contact information which Jawbone’s prior e-mail had asked for in the event the reset trick didn’t work. Again, in a couple short hours we had a response, complete with confirmation number that a new band would be on its way to us, and that there was no need to send out old band back.

This tells us two important things:

1) Jawbone presumably has enough diagnostics information on hand from other customer band’s that they don’t need ours to help determine why UPs have failed since release.

2) Jawbone customer service is awesome.¹

Sure, we’re disappointed that the product we bought failed in so short a time, but we’re very happy with Jawbone’s response to the issue. In fact, Jawbone’s customer support was so fantastic, that we would gladly purchase another product from them in the future. Other companies should take note of this, because even if an unfortunate issue comes up in a product, it’s how the respective company responds that determines whether the customer remains loyal. In this case, assuming Jawbone continues to put out awesome products, we won’t hesitate to buy from them again.² Good job, Jawbone!

Tagged as: customer service, gadgets, iphone, mendax.org