August 2020 by George Hurd
I want to be clear... I don't typically write negative reviews after having only one bad or unpleasant experience. I mean, it depends on the experience, but typically. Any company can provide poor service or have a product fail. But when the issues accumulate, that's when I begin to wonder if this is just how the business serves it's clients.Such is the case with NCE...I've spoken to Matt on the phone three times regarding an issue with my Power Cab; the first time he claimed that if I didn't purchase it directly from NCE there was no warranty protection. I argrued with him that this didn't make sense, but he was adamant that this was NCE policy. He even went so fars as to inform me that this is how it had been in all the years he'd worked there.The second time, after telling him that I had reviewed the warranty on the product and that no such language existed there, he insisted that it was. After sending an email to NCE I received a response from Ed informing me that the information I had received from Matt was incorrect and that warranty coverage was provided regardless of where I purchased my NCE product, so long as I was the original owner and had a receipt. Which I am, and I do.The third time was after I had sent my Power Cab in for testing; the tracking on my pkg indicated that it had been delivered about three weeks prior to my calling. Now, NCE has a disclaimer on their site asking customers 'not to call' to check on their repair order. But, sometimes things get lost and I thought three weeks without hearing from NCE was reasonable to touch bases to make sure that they had what I'd sent them.I asked Matt how long the turn-around was on a Power Cab, and he insisted on letting me know that the turn-around time for Power Cabs was no different than Pro-Cabs or Smart Boosters or Command Stations, etc., etc., and listed a number of products for which the turn-around time would be the same, talking over me as I tried to interject that I just wanted to know what the turn-around time was. As though my question was in regard to the turn-around times by product! I didn't know if certain product went to different benches, or different departments. I mean, I know they're a small outfit, but I was simply trying to provide information to Matt that might help him give me good and accurate information in response. Eventually I had to raise my voice to interrupt him to ask him what the damn turn-around time was through the shop before he would give me an answer!Then, after getting my Power Cab back from NCE, none of the programming that I had set up worked anymore. The long address for my loco doesn't work, I had to activate the short address, and I still haven't figured out how to make the long address work. Certain sound effects of my Loksound decoder no longer work, and I have no idea how to get those effects to work again.NCE suggested via email that I reset my loco's decoder... but should I really have to do that? NCE didn't perform work on my loco, they performed work on my Power Cab. Why didn't I get it back with the same functionality that existed when I sent it still in tact?I may be looking at the last piece of NCE equipment that I ever own. Not that I don't like the product, I do... but NCE customer support, at least in my experience, has been bad not just once... not just twice... but consistently bad... and I only have so much patience for this.
