Watching Asus over the past few months has made clear the importance of having good customer service and support. Since the brand became cited for its bad service back in May, it's been working on improving things, and it's just put its next service improvement into place.
The September 30 addition outlines changes to the company's "repair quotation format". Asus says it's "added a new column to our quotation notifications to better explain the type of repairs and their status". The repairs will be separated into "covered under warranty", "optional", or "required". This is welcome news given that the original concerns were largely over Asus' ridiculous and unnecessary quotations.
Here's a quick break down. Back in May, Gamers Nexus (GN) published a video shining a light on the problems with Asus' RMA process. The channel showed how Asus quoted GN a $200 repair for "customer induced damage" which was cosmetic and unrelated to what they'd sent the device in for originally. Eventually the in-warranty repair was sorted but not without some scaremongering and back-and-forth.
The main issue highlighted, which has been an issue for other users, was with unnecessary quotations and pressure to accept and pay for them. The latest "quotation notification" change should hopefully go some way to preventing this.
After GN's video and an initial tone-deaf response that seemed to blame customers for not understanding the RMA process, Asus committed to improving things and came up with a list of steps it would undertake to improve the RMA process, first published in May. These are as follows:
- Clearer communication in quotation emails
- Video and photo documentation
- Transparent repair reports (effective September 30, 2024)
- Enhanced service communication (effective September 30, 2024)
- Changes to repair prices for component damage (effective immediately)
- Refined repair options for cosmetic damage (effective immediately)
- Improved quotation accuracy (effective immediately)
Back in June, after meeting with GN to discuss the matter, the company also agreed to implement a bunch of further and more specific changes, including the creation of a dedicated team to look through negative surveys and try to fix any problems identified.
Since then, it's been putting its service improvement plan into practice, with this month's being some of the more meaningful for the customer experience. Quoted repairs will now be demarcated as covered under warranty, optional (for issues that "could affect your device’s functionality, but are not required for basic use"), or required (for repairs "that are essential for the problems you reported or are necessary for your device’s normal daily operation").
All this is good news, but we'll have to wait and see on a longer-term basis how the changes are implemented and what it looks like for the end-user. Hopefully it'll mean the end of outrageous and unnecessary quotations and the start of a much easier and more transparent RMA process.
