Blade 15 with Razer RMA for over 2 months and no sign of when I'll get it back

Hi all,

I just wanted to share on this forum what you might expect with an RMA to Razer. It is the worst customer experience I’ve received in my life by a huge margin.

I sent my 2018 Blade 15 Advanced out for RMA 9 weeks ago and Razer Support still cannot give me an ETA for when I will receive a replacement.

It all began with my 10 month old 2018 Blade 15 Advanced that had an issue with a rattling fan and distorted sound coming from one of the speakers since it was new. As an expensive laptop, I wanted it working properly, so decided to send it in for repair prior to the warranty expiring, hopeful I would not end up like one of the many horror stories I had read about regarding Razer RMAs. I was far too optimistic.

I’m now 9 weeks into the experience with Razer support fobbing me off every few days telling me they are “hoping for your kind patience”. I’ve contacted Razer on Twitter, Facebook and tried messaging the CEO on Facebook. They provide nothing other than a hastened response from the support team to tell me they are still working on the case.

About 3 weeks after sending the laptop in, they tell me the issue with the fan and speaker persists after replacing the parts and that they will send me a replacement laptop instead. Since then, all the response from support are along the lines of “we are waiting for our warehouse team to provide an update”.

If you have a Razer product with a few issues but it is still mostly functional, I would strongly advise not to send it in for repair unless you want to be without your expensive product for multiple months.

Perhaps there is a Razer rep on this forum who will be able to follow up for me? For other readers, I'd appreciate if you can upvote my reddit.com/r/razer post and hopefully bring Razer's attention to this terrible affair.

https://www.reddit.com/r/razer/comments/g54c8q/blade_15_with_razer_rma_for_over_2_months_and_no/

Timeline of my experience is below:

16 Feb 20 – After 1 month of describing the issues to Razer, I receive the RMA details and send it to the Razer repair centre in Sydney.

17 Feb 20 – Repair centre receives it.

25 Feb 20 – Razer Support tell me they are awaiting update on status of the repair

01 Mar 20 – Razer Support tell me the issue with the fan and speaker remains after replacing the parts. They are still working on it.

07 Mar 20 – Razer Support tell me they are still waiting for repair centre to update them

11 Mar 20 – Razer Escalations Team contact me to tell me the speaker issue persists after swapping the parts. They will check if they can replace the whole unit for me. “I'll check with our warehouse team if we have one in-stock. Please give me 24 to 48 hours for any update.”

15 Mar 20 - Razer tell me they are still waiting for the warehouse team to update them.

20 Mar 20 – Razer send their usual boiler plate reply telling me they are still working on the case and will contact me once they have an update.

25 Mar 20 - Razer apologise for the delay, and append their usual boiler plate reply telling me they are still working on the case.

27 Mar 20 - Razer offer me a replacement 2019 Blade 15 BASE model. I tell them this is not an acceptable replacement for my ADVANCED model and ask they send me a replacement ADVANCED model instead.

31 Mar 20 – Razer respond to my request and tell me they have no stock of my 2018 model left and please wait for their stock to be replenished. They have no ETA when this will be. “Looking forward for your kind patience”. I reply and ask them to send me a different ADANCED model than my original 2018 model, a variant that they do have stock of.

01 Apr 20 – Razer tell me they are still working on it. I contact Razer Twitter support to see if they can help.

03 Apr 20 – Razer tell me they are still working on it.

04 Apr 20 – Razer tell me my 2018 model is End of Life and there will be no more incoming stock. They have a proposed replacement but need to follow up with the relevant team.

07 Apr 20 – Razer tell me they are still working on it. I contact Razer Twitter support to see if they can help.

08 Apr 20 – Razer ask if I will accept a US keyboard layout model instead of my original UK layout as they have no stock of the UK model. I say yes that is fine, whatever brings me a replacement laptop quicker.

16 Apr 20 - I hear nothing for a week and explain my continued frustration and ask why they have they not found an alternative means to getting me a replacement model if they have had no stock of refurb units for a month.

17 Apr 20 - Razer tell me they are still working on it. I tell them my frustrations again.

18 Apr 20 – Razer support dude tells me he understands the situation and would like to hasten things up but is still waiting for an update from the higher department. “Please give us a bit more time to look into this matter”

20 Apr 20 – Razer tell me they are still working on it.

 

ASUS did this to me one time. It ****ing sucked. It wasn't until I called basically every day, went through the same song and dance, asked to speak to a manager every single time, that they were finally like "Okay we have this replacement for you" (It was way better than the one I sent in for repair, but getting it was like pulling teeth.)

But yeah it took them 2 months.

Best advice I can give is keep reaching out to Razer. Try and tag your tweets on twitter, post on instagram, facebook and other places, try and get your problem to go viral and watch them send you something asap lol.

The good news is, they will most likely be sending you something better to replace it.

It's worth mentioning that this is probably not the typical experience. The world is currently suffering from the worst pandemic in decades, and despite the numbers china is reporting, they are most likely the hardest hit. Razer is a chinese company. They are probably very understaffed right now. Don't mistake my tone, I'm not attempting to defend them, seriously, they should have recognized awhile ago the direction this was headed and just sent you brand new one or some **** to make up for their ****up, but you know, it might help your peace of mind.

 

Thanks for your response. The reddit thread got the attention of the reddit Razer team who messaged me and told me they would try and fix this.

Two days later I was put through to the 'Razer Executive Response Team' who told me they would expedite the replacement.

Three days later they told me they will send me a new Blade 15 240hz 2070 MaxQ version of the laptop, so fairly pleased with getting the upgrade. Suppose that is fair compensation for a nearly three month long RMA.

I received notification of shipment from Hong Kong yesterday and expect to receive a (hopefully working) laptop on Monday.

 

Lol I’m thinking now breaking my advanced 2018, in order to get that upgrade even take 3 months

 

Feel like the headache they put me through in the past I deserve a new blade stealth. ​

 

True in your case it was not headache but heart attack , like almost loosing 2K bucks?

 

I won’t argue that my friend. I was maaaaaaad that day. But, since I made such a huge stink about it they rushed to hush me up. Lol.

@sleepysnake Hopefully they fixed your laptop and it’s all good Monday when you get it. I’ve had a nightmarish experience with Razer twice in the past so I sympathize. Oops missed the part where they updated you to a newer laptop. If it’s brand new that’s very nice. They might finally be doing right by their customers these days.

 

I requested a recovery USB 1.5 years ago and I'm still waiting for it. Razer support is 100% incompetent and slow. It has severely dissuaded me from purchasing another Razer Blade.

 

I received a brand new i7 9750, 2070 unit yesterday which according to the box was manufactured in March. Limited testing suggests there is no backlight bleed or coil whine, and it has lower temps than my my early 1070 model. So quite pleased and thanks to Razer for eventually sorting out the situation in the end.

 

The new unit is a significant step up in quality between my August 2018 manufactured unit and this one. Barely any back light bleed, working fans, much much cooler temperatures, and lower fan noise. Having just played The Division 2 for 90 mins, I have a peak of 85c on the CPU, and 75c on the GPU. The old Blade would have been closer to 100c on the CPU and 85c on the GPU, even with clean fans, undervolt and new thermal paste. Certainly they have improved the cooling system by a fair margin on the 2019 Razer Blades.

I'm happy with how Razer dealt with me in the end, though it's a shame it took the post on Reddit and on here to get in contact with the Support who actually have the power to make things right for the customer.

 

Well @sleepysnake, I am glad that it worked out for you at the end. In my case I am getting into the 5th month dealing with their support with 3 RMAs already, almost 3,5 months not able to use my unit and still until now fighting to find a solution to my issue. Thus, as you can see it can get worse .

To be honest, though I am tired and frustrated with all this, with their behavior they made me so stubborn to take it to the end that if it doesn't not work (my warranty ends on the beginning of July) I will even sue them for not respecting their commitment to warranty.

Do you know if with the new unit your warranty is renewed?

 

So I'm also having a blast of a Razer support experience...

Blade Pro 2019 had a weird stain like blotch on the screen, right in the middle, from day one. Pretty distracting.
Created a RMA process on the 14th of April.
Was quickly confirmed and sent a FedEX shipping label, already paid for by Razer.
Only managed to send the unit on May 5th.
Got it today, took 20 days. Not bad considering I'm in Portugal and the laptop had to go to Germany for repair.
They said the screen was replaced.

And it was, with the wrong one...



Got a 144Hz screen instead of the original 240Hz that the unit shipped with, just great.

Looking forward to waiting another 20 days to get it back...

sigh

 

Brief update on my side, we are reaching to 5 months and still my issue is not resolved.

Razer, after me asking to come in contact with a senior representative offered to replace my blade (since apparently they cannot solve the issue, since it is motherboard related), but guess what two weeks now they were trying to convince me to get a German (QWERZ) layout instead of the US (QWERTY) layout that I've bought. The excuse is, that they have run out of US layout stock (seriously?), which I do not believe of course (finally they weren't, afterwards they informed me that the US layouts are only available in North America region and since I am located in Germany I can get only German, seriously again?). My guess is that they want to empty their German layout stock considering that the Blade 2020 is announced already.

In any case I have kindly refused three times since I do not want a German layout and I've not paid >3k to get something else. As I explicitly explain to them I could have bought my blade from Germany (with better warranty terms) but I didn't because they couldn't offer me the US layout which I explicitly wanted.

Now they have told me that if they will proceed with a forth repair, and now I am waiting to get the shipping labels to sent my unit in once more. My god, what a nightmare and what a poor support.

 

Guess they figured you wouldn’t notice? That’s terrible though. Probably a lot of them left over since no one is buying them after the release of the 240hz panels. Hopefully they get it right the next time.

That’s terrible that after 5 months they still haven’t fixed your issue. I don’t even know how they have the gull to tell you that you can’t have a replacement of the same keyboard type that you bought. To me that makes no sense at all. None. If you bought a US layout keyboard then that’s what you get as a replacement.

It’s really sad to me to see stories like this. I really want to see them get their act together, but I can’t see that happening if things like this are still happening.

 

You would think so. Still no reply from Razer since the 25th of May. Luckily I'm not really moving around a whole lot and have my desktop for work and play, if not I'd be furious.

 

@Terreos I do not know mate, but seriously I am done with them. This was the worst support I've ever had, I will think it very carefully to buy a laptop from them again. I will try to solve this as long as it takes (well beginning of July the warranty period of 1 year ends, so they might want to postpone it as much as possible so that if the problem persists even after the next repair to tell me well now you need to pay yourself to have it fixed. I really believe they can tell me that).

It is hilarious, they have me now for one week waiting for getting this new shipping label to send in my machine for another repair, the 4th in a row, since I refused to get a German layout replacement and every two days I am getting this usual boiler plate reply from them about how sorry they are for the delay and that they are trying their best to arrange the issue. If you ask me this a bull*****t service.

Now why they cannot replace my unit with a US layout, that's also something I cannot answer. Actually, for all these times they've paid for shipping my unit back and forth it will be cheaper to send me a new unit from US, I really do not know what to say go figure.

 

Well for me, it was my working machine which I couldn't use for almost 3 months. I guess you understand that these three months had an affect on my working performance and guess what, they did not give a sh**t about it when I mentioned it to them and even now after 5 months of hassle they still keep making my life hard instead of trying to help me as fast as possible. Anyways, lesson learned.

You know respect and recognition is something that you earn from your customers and for sure they are not on the right path for that, and this in long term will have an impact for their sales if not already considering the complaints that I read around and as other companies are catching up with what they can offer as similar products and build quality.

 

Where did you get US keyboard here in Germany, reseller or from US? They’re the support apparently separated between EU and US mixing them might slow down the progress. So far I know their repair center here doesn’t have US unit, it should be handled on factory based in Hongkong which might make things longer since apparently headquarters guy should recheck that.

 

Bought it from amazon.com and had it shipped over here since I wanted explicitly a US layout unit.

However this is not an excuse, actually it is a really cheap excuse. Imagine that I was living in US and have bought the laptop while I was there and then for any kind of reason, e.g. due to work, had to move to another place in the planet. Should they have offered me the layout that is closest to this place? That's a bad policy, and at the end I do not think that it would be a problem let's say to ship a US unit from Hong Kong to Germany if not from US. Let's be serious, if you want to be named a good company these things should not be a problem.

We've discussed about it on the thread that I have opened in the RAZER forum ( https://insider.razer.com/index.php?threads/do-you-guys-get-this-in-your-blades-as-well.55990/). Now also on top of that noise I am getting a crackling/scratch noise every now and then coming from the inner part of the machine.

Actually today I finally got the shipping label for their repair center in Hamburg (like all the previous 3 times), I am gonna ship it on Tuesday since on Monday is a holiday. Let's see whether they will fix if finally this time or we will have another round in the series. I hope they replace the board this time because I do not see any other way to solve these issues.

 

Of course it’s big problem that you’ve also to take the risk. Razer support departments, in every region has different rights on handling cases I remember writing in support ticket in english with no reply after asking CS in Hamburg they said it’s not their right to handle that but it’s US support apparently so they made new ticket EU for me, same with yours probably it involved a lot departments, EU support, headquarters and probably factory in Hongkong. I’m not defending Razer, but it’s their way to traces cases. The best way to buy such gaming “risk” laptops is having support around, I meant from where you bought. If you’re in US it’ll be same day replacement from Amazon I believe, here on Amazon.de as well. Razer return procedur is known long so Poeple buying from 3rd party for avoiding that including me on last Blade (late 2019 stealth) purchase. Regardless hope you’ll get it back to your door soon.

 

Well, nothing but radio silence from Razer EU for a week now.

 

Don't wait, keep calling them like through call support or chat, if you want I can ask your case progress I know someone inside...if you don't bother PM me your case number.

 

Definitely take @Joikansai advice and bombard them with calls and messages. Last time I was dealing with them I was doing that and made a Reddit thread about it and made a lot of commotion. They got me sorted out the same day I did that. They’ll do anything to silence you once it becomes public like that. Not exactly the most civil way of doing things, but it does work.

 

Thanks guys. I messaged them again and they said in the next 24 hours the issue will be sorted. Let's see.
If not I'll take you up on that @Joikansai , thanks again

 

For what it is worth and to give an update for my case, today and finally after 6 months got a new unit (shipped from Hong Kong with an assembly date 04/2020) with the same layout as my original purchase (I was very welcome to that). However, guess what? the same two issues are there to the new unit as well, especially the high pitch noise on microphone output.

I've just sent them another email, I am not expecting anything else to be honest since it seems to be a generic problem on the OLED batch units (I guess a hardware failure or something). I've wasted extremely too much time and effort, if they are willing to do anything else, good, if not I guess I'll have to leave with it.

 

Finally got my Blade Pro back last week.
Panel was correctly replaced with a 240Hz unit. Which is luckily a very good one at that. Pretty much non existant light bleeds and no dead pixels. Also no weird blotches this time ^^

All in all took almost 10 weeks.
The turnaround time from when the laptop was shipped, fixed, and shipped back was pretty fast at about a week for both times.
Can't really complain about that. Plus the free Fed Ex pickup and express shipping was very much appreciated.
Still, replacing a 240hz screen with a 144hz unit and shipping it back to me was a big mistake in the first place...

Online support was what slowed it down. They were helpful but I got bounced around a lot talking with different people. Took a while for them to recognize the mistake and have it shipped back.

Fingers crossed it's the last time I need them.

 

Nice, I wish you everything goes well and you don't need them again .

Indeed their online support is extremely slow, I am on the waiting two weeks now for a shipping label, sending them emails, etc... no response so far. I hope they can improve on this in the future as well as to the QA.

 

I’m having an eerily similar experience. Am 10 weeks into an RMA and being told that they are “trying to find stock in the warehouse”. Have just started kicking off on Twitter and Reddit so hopefully that helps. Shouldn’t have to do that though!!

 

I had a major difference in customer service experience than you guys. Hope you guys get yours resolved real soon.

Either I got lucky or maybe the experience is different from region to region as I'm located in the US.
I got a brand new replacement in exactly two weeks due to a faulty motherboard. If it wasn't for the shipping time involved, I would had it faster.

I was really impressed on how quickly my Razer Blade was determined that it needed a replacement and how responsive they were to get me a returned label (2 days). Once it got back to them, it only took them another 2 days to have it approved and to have another one shipped out to me. However, knowing the facts about their poor customer service, I did contacted them everyday (web chat) to stay on top of them and each time they pulled through with their promises and updates. I am more impressed with Razer's customer service than my Asus that took nearly a month to get back.

 

Give them pain on the social, they do not understand otherwise.

Being in US could possibly make a difference indeed since I guess it is easier for them to address things and also I guess the repair center might be better from the one they are collaborating in Germany at least.

I do not know what to say, for me still after 7 months that I've started the initial RMA still fighting to get my problem resolved. At the moment, the replacement unit has been also sent to the pits since it was facing the same problems as my original unit and I am awaiting their response.

 

Hmm, disappointing to hear these stories. I'm having the same issue with a Razer EU. The laptop (Blade 15 Mercury White) has already been RMAed to Germany once after BSODing constantly. They replaced the SSD but the problem persists. The CPU now also massively overheats and it still BSODs. I started this process in May/June and no sign of them even issuing another solution. No new RMA number. Just get batted around from one support person to another and none of them even read the notes/history on the thread.

 

Sorry to hear for your issue, being in a similar situation for almost 8 months now (yes I am still in the RMA process) I really feel your frustration. Patience and try to break their balls as much as you can if possible, e.g. sending them mails and contact their chat support every day, write in their social, etc...

 

How are you all getting on with your current issues?

I thought my story had a happy ending but now the replacement unit has constant BSODs while gaming. I have isolated it to a hardware issue after many driver installs, and recover to factory recovery image. Sadly I'm now out of warranty and do not want to pay Razer $1000 or more for a motherboard replacement and wait 3 months for the repair.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/razer/comments/js6yzk/6_month_old_out_of_warranty_razer_blade_15/

 

Are you sure that your warranty was not renewed since you got a new replacement unit?

 

It was brand new as far as I could tell. No marks anywhere, factory packaging as my original unit, and it was manufactured only a few months before I received it.

I am in conversation with Razer requesting more than 20% off the repair. Debating whether to buy a much cheaper but still expensive used motherboard from ebay at $1000 USD after shipping and import.

 

If you live in Germany, there’s call support, I’d contact them to get things faster. Not sure how they work today but like 2 years ago, they work quite fast handling my case. Better than waiting Mail respond imo.