[Bob The Junkie]

As many of you know, I have recently had a lot of problems with a UK company called Overclockers UK. (www.overclockers.co.uk).

For those that don't know the story, I've written a very short account of the long battle I've had with them below.

I am asking all members who read this, to post your comments and thoughts about this matter. Please note a copy of this link will be sent to Overclockers so that they can see that if they cause problems with one person, a lot of their customers are affected. So as standard forum rules, please post *nicely*, no swearing or discusting comments, but please do voice your opinion, it would be greatly appreciated.

Also, if Overclockers do force me to take this matter to court, I would deeply appreciate any help with legal funding that members can provide, as I will be using a legal representative to help me with this case. Please note this matter started on the 25th of Janurary. It is now the 25th of Feb.

Here is the offical letter I wrote to Overclockers - which explains everything.

Dear Mr ProudFoot

Over the last few weeks I have had some problems with your company. After trying to contact you many times over the telephone, fax, and email and having no reply, I am now writing to you in person using recorded delivery mail.

The reason I am writing to you is explained in the document below, which are two faxes I have sent to your company on the number advertised on your website over the last two weeks. I have not received any contact from your company in this time regarding the matter. Having spoken to my trading standards adviser, I am now writing this letter to you in the hope that this matter is resolved. I have been advised to inform you that if this matter is not resolved within seven days of you receiving this letter, I will be taking court action against Overclockers. Please be advised that if I am forced to take this action, I will be asking the court to consider not only refunding the cost of the goods I paid for, but also for compensation for the postage and travel expenses I have occurred whilst dealing with this matter, and any legal fees I may have to pay.

Below is a copy of the recent email I sent to your email address, as listed on your forums. (spie@overclockers.co.uk). It includes all of the information I have sent in the faxes I have sent to your company. Below that is a copy of the original fax I sent to you, when I first received an email stating my goods (the repaired ones) were being shipped back to me. I have not included all of the emails I have sent to your company, which have been bounced.

Please be advised that between the dates of the 11th and the 14th of February, I will not be able to be reached on my house telephone number. However you will still be able to reach me on my mobile number.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you within the seven days, to resolve this matter.


---Most recent email (Sent 08/02/04). Includes the faxes I sent on the 07/02/04---

Mr. ProudFoot,

Recently I returned two items to you for replacement, a Radeon 9600XT graphics card, and a MSI Neo - FIS2R motherboard. (RMA number)

After two hours of trying to get through to your technical department on the phone (it was either engaged or I was getting cut off) I managed to get through to one of your sales team (Chris) who managed to pass a message onto one of the technical support team to contact me. I was upset at this as it is a premium rate number to contact your team, and I do not have access to a fax machine from my home.

Finally one of the tech support team rang me back, and after a lengthy conversation with him, he told me to return the goods, and sent a RMA number to my email address I used when I purchased the goods.

A few minutes later I received the email, and sent off the two items (motherboard and graphics card) a few days later to be replaced. About a week after I returned the goods, I received an automated email stating that my replacement goods had been shipped to me. However I was not contacted by anyone before they were shipped, to let me know that they were being replaced, or when they were being replaced.

As it has been a year since I ordered the goods in the first place, I have moved house from the address you have in your records. No-one asked me if I had moved address and simply sent the goods to the old address without informing me.

In the email I was sent, your company states that if there are any problems with any or the returns I was being shipped, then I should send an email to BookIn-1@overclockers.co.uk, the actual text sent in the email is below:

"The following products are on this rma, if there are any discrepancies please
contact Overclockers as soon as possible either by email to
BookIn-1@overclockers.co.uk or by phone on 0871 222 8528."

However this email address does not exist and I got a bounced email. I also tried emailing support@overclockers.co.uk, admin@overclockers.co.uk, sales@overclockers.co.uk, martin.goldstone@overclockers.co.uk but these were either bounced or I was informed that you did not accept emails anymore from the outside world.

Hoping my goods were ok, and that all of the questions I needed answering in the email would be ok, I did not trail all of the way down to my remote office (a good 20 mile trip) to ask nicely to use their fax machine, and I just drove the 50 miles from my home to the location you delivered the goods to, to pick them up.

However, when I collected the goods from the nice person who had taken them in (as I said, I've not lived here for a year, and I was never asked which address the goods should be sent to) I was disgusted at the goods I received.

There were three major things wrong with the goods.

1. They were "B grade" stock and had been used before. The packaging of them including CD's and things had obviously been opened and used. Although this was a major annoyance to me and I had returned faulty goods and wanted new replacement goods, I let this one go.

2. The reason I am writing this email is the second reason. The motherboard shipped back to me is not the same as the one I sent in for replacement. The model I sent in was the MSI NEO - FIS2R K8T800 and included all of the optional extras on the board. When I purchased the board I paid a lot of money more for the optional extras it came with, which include the promise controller for additional RAID and PATA support, the 5.1 channel onboard sound system from the Realtek chipset, and the IEE1394 (firewire) controller. On the board I received, none of these extras were present. It seems as though you have sent me a NEO-FSR (the basic version) in a NEO-FIS2R box.

3. The graphics card you sent me had, had the heatsink removed for some reason. When it was removed whoever took it apart has lost one of the pins that kept the heatsink on, and had replaced it with a completely different type. This meant that not only did the heatsink sit on the board incorrectly, but it looked terrible too, and I was afraid to use the graphics card, just in case it overheated and died.

Now this motherboard is next to useless to me. Not only can I not correctly use my 5.1 surround sound system as the board does not have the optical audio out, but I also cannot access any of my data, as the board does not support the Promise RAID controller that the drives used to run on.
I spent well over 10% of the total cost of the goods returning them to you, and now I will have to spend another large amount of money, and wait yet another week to get the correct goods back from you again. I think this is not on, I do not want to have to spend additional money on returning items to you that should have been replaced correctly in the first place, and have to wait another week to get my computer running again. I also spent £15 petrol and a morning off work to get to the address that you sent the items to, and should not have, only to have to send them back again.

In total, I will probably have spent around the region of £65 not including the time I had to take off from work to get my components replaced, including petrol, shipping, and phone calls which I think is completely unacceptable for a company of your size and reputation.

To top off all of the grief I've had, I still cannot contact your company via the phone, and so I've had to ask nicely to use someone else?s' fax machine.

Please be advised that as I have been unable to contact you through the phone or email, and as you have not responded to my fax, I have been in contact with trading standards to try to resolve this matter. They have advised me to write a "time of the essence" letter to you directly, stating the grounds that I would consider to be a reasonable settlement to this situation. If you have not settled this problem within that time, then I will be taking your company to court. If you have not responded to this email by the end of the day, I will have no choice but to send you this letter.

Obviously I do not want to have to go through the courts to settle this, but please be advised that I will quite happily do so if that is what it will take to resolve this matter.

I have ordered many things from Overclockers before, and have been very happy with the service you have provided. This is the one occasion where I have encountered problems with your company.

The problems seem to arise from communication problems within the company, and with its customers. The actual return of working goods to me (even though they were the wrong ones, and second hand) was fairly quick, and I was quite happy with the service I received there. Obviously I was not happy when the goods arrived.

To try to resolve this matter quickly, I would be satisfied if all the following things are met.

A member of your staff contacts me on the details above, via phone to sort this out.

A courier service paid for by Overclockers, comes to collect the incorrect goods (graphics card and motherboard) from my current address, to return them to Overclockers.

Overclockers ship me a new graphics card and motherboard, to the same specification as those sent by me originally or better, by next day delivery within five working days. If you are unable to send me the same specification, then I will accept better specification components. However this would have to be agreed by me before-hand.

Please note that I would deem the above requests to be reasonable for the hassle and trouble I have had with these goods and your company.

As mentioned above, if you have not replied by the end of the day to this email, I will take it to mean that you do not wish to resolve this matter informally. If this is the case I will be writing a formal letter to you to clarify my position, and then if the matter is still not dealt with, I will be moving on to legal action. Please note however that if I am forced to take legal action, I will be asking to court for not only the cost of the components I send back refunded, but also for any legal fees I may face, the cost of the petrol I was forced to use to get my components from the incorrect address, and any postage costs that I will have occurred sending you the goods back for replacement.

I am also sending this letter to my Trading Standards representative as proof I have sent it, and a third party incase any of the emails become 'lost' or bounced by your mail servers.

Thank you for your time.



--Original Email sent to BookIn-1@overclockers.co.uk on the 01/02/04?

Good afternoon.

Recently I returned a set of MSI motherboard and ATI Radeon graphics card to you for replacement.

I've just received an email from you stating that two products had been replaced, and were being shipped back to me, however I do have some questions about these items.

Firstly, both goods are listed as "B-grade". What does this mean? Have the goods got all of the instructions and extra equipment with them that I sent them back with? Will the five year warranty that they have, be affected? Will the boxes be intact?

Secondly, the graphics card I sent back was from Sapphire. The one you're shipping back is from PowerColor. I've no problem with this, as the sapphire one did not have any temperature monitor on it. However I am bothered that if there are any problems with this card, who do I send it back to? As I did not purchase it, I do not have any receipt for paying for it. Will you ship me a receipt for the card I can use to prove when I got it incase of any warranty problems?

Thirdly, which address did you ship my order to? I am not living at the address I used when I first purchased the goods, and no-one asked me my current living address at any stage during the return.

The shipping number I was given originally was
The shipping number I was sent in the email just sent to me was

Thank you very much.


---------------

So there's the story.

This morning, Overclockers phoned me. After 40 mins of the rep "Martin" checking everything with his boss, they decided that the best they could do for me was a replacement of my goods with the correct MSI FIS2R motherboard and 9600XT but still B-grade stock, or replacing the Graphics card with a unbranded 128MB 9700 Pro card. On their website by the way, this is listed as less cost than the 256MB 9600XT I bought. They refused to upgrade me to a 6600GT for my trouble, and didn't want to hear about me offering to pay some of the extra towards it. I ended up getting an email address for them for contact, and said I'd speak to my legal rep.

So now I'm asking you all what you think. Over seven days had passed since I sent the letter (they got it on the 11th) in which I stated I would be taking them to court, so I am still considering it while my legal rep gets back to me.

As you can see they have offered me nothing to keep me happy, not offering to pay for costs or even a simple upgrade which would have cost them next to nothing.

I've now contacted MSI about their *take back stock and fob them off with second grade stuff* attitude, as I know my board could not have been repaired (I know my stuff) and would have had to be replaced.

I have also contacted Watchdog (a UK TV program which looks into consumer problems and exposes bad companies) about Overclocker's discusting customer service and uncontactability.

As this is a 64bit website, and all members here like using the forfront of technology, I would like to expose Overclockers UK (who deal in forfront overclocking hardware) for the poor customer attitude and service that they have, and encourage them to live up to their good name of service, and decide to re-think their position. A company with a bad reputation for service is a company that will go under, and no-one wants to buy from people who want nothing more to do with them once their money is taken.

If there are any legal reps reading this or have experience in law, please contact me via email or pm to offer any advice you may have, I would appreciate it, until my legal rep gets back to me.

Please post your thoughts, comments and feelings.

-BTJ

[fother2]

I'll send you another place you can contact bob in a im later :)

I think you are doing the right thing, believe it or not a LOT of companies get away with murder because the consumer would rather shell out more cash than cause a fuss. It is our rights as customers who buy products because of the firms good warranty and support on paper to have that support in fact. There are plenty of independent watchdogs around the uk and they would gladly help out, when I used to run my own business I had to pay for insurance incase I was ever taken to court by a customer. I'll see which watch dogs work in your area bob and get you a list, there is one I know of that are interested in overclockers and they are a big magazine

I'd also just like to add that dabs.com and ebuyer have first class delivery and go beyond standard customer warranties. If any people are buying parts in the UK i'd really recomend those two firms as i've yet to have an RMA rejected...even after 6 months! :)

[Bob The Junkie]

They did not reject my RMA, in fact they replaced it, which was good. However now they're taking the biscuit in their offer to keep me happy after all of this mess, which is unacceptable.

-BTJ

[JRS]

Well, from past experience I have never had a problem with OcUK at all. I know that contacting them is a bit of a mare (no e-mail and an inadequate phone setup that they are changing soon I believe), but I've never known them get things as wrong as they obviously have done in your case. All I can say is that I hope you get everything sorted with them.

As a side-note, the only companies I've ever had any similar trouble with have been Ebuyer (don't get me started on them) and Eclipse Computers in Coventry (and definitely don't let me get started on this bunch of cowboys).

[Narnos]

BTJ, Eventhough I am from Australia and the laws are somewhat different here, my understanding is that you should be getting a NEW REPLACEMENT of EXACTLY what you bought. If EXACTLY what you bought is not available, then you should be either refunded your money or able to pay the difference for your choice of product. It is not their right to just choose some crappy arse 9700 and think that you will accept it becuase the number is 100pts higher than your product.

Personally I would just keep all the goods not use them and go directly to court now. You have contacted them more than enough and in my opinion you have tried many times to resolve this matter to no avail.

Obviously a consumer rights body in the UK will probably advise you of your next best step.....

Also, is it possible for you to go to Staffordshire in person? If not, you should just approach both manufacturers of the hardware because my understanding is that the manufacutrers are the ones who excersise the warranty (well that is the case in Australia, most retailers will only validate warranties within 21 days of purchasing, otherwise you have to go to the manufacturer)

Unfortunatley, you might be being had by them as they are probably recieving credit notes or new replacements for your hardware and trying to give you some crappy parts lying are the stock rooms.

[Witch8r]

I feel for ya BTJ. Sounds like me trying to get something done with my wireless phone provider. I've had to talk to 3 or 4 different reps, on several occasions, to just get something fixed that should have been corrected the first time. But sounds like your problem with OVERCLOCKERS UK is way beyond unexceptable. I have a local Fox TV News Station with a segment called Problem Solvers. You can contact them with a problem and they will visit thew offender, video camera in hand and put it on the news usually gets fast results. If you have any consumer watch dogs like that , contact them. If not sue!

[Grumpy]

Recieving a MB back on RMA that is not the same and of lesser features is downright rude. Someone tried that on me once claiming the model was unable to be replaced as it was no longer stocked by the distributor. Whatever the excuse, they should either give you a product with the same features or a full refund. Whoever is at fault it is not you and they have to abide by the law.

[Bob The Junkie]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that they said they would replace the MB with another MSI NEO FIS2r board, the correct one, but its still going to be repaired or second hand stock.

-BTJ

[fother2]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that they said they would  replace the MB with another MSI NEO FIS2r board, the correct one, but its still going to be repaired or second hand stock.

-BTJ

thats the same as my lcd warranty is, still i guess it's better than nothing and you did learn not to buy from them in the future.

Good luck with any court cases or watchdog inquieries bob :)

[Camaro]

Bob im with narnos on this one you have definatly done your part and more with that company if they want to give you inferier products they should be taken to court as if u do you can get several times what the parts accually cost they prolly no this but are assuming u will just let it go as most ppl are afraid of the legal system or the hassel that it can be

[brozly]

Don't know about the UK, Attorny's general work off a % of the settelment, but I don't think any of them will charge for a conceltation- wouldn't hurt to talk to them.

[cammpoint]

It's hard to believe that a company with this kind of customer service still exists. Seems like legal channels are the only way to resolve a problem with them. You would think that in a highly competitive market that they would try a little harder to to satisfy their customer. Not a good way to get return business, or recommendations.

[Athildja]

Bob, I honestly feel they are trying to give you less than adequite parts. in this case I feel the only reason you were called was your letter stating your willingness to go to court.
If they felt they had a good case they would not be offering a "settlement". But instead are trying to put you off with a few "shinny beads" .
Most Honest companies will replace with new when they can and upgrade if they are able.
I sadly do not think that the offer Overclockers.uk is giving you is honest or fair.
just the hassel of contacting them alone should show their lack of customer support.
and as Fother2 said a lot of companies get away with things because people do not want to or can't afford to take it to court.
I personally would take them to court over this. and as Brozly said a lot of atorney's will work for a % of the settlement.

[Narnos]

Try and find a comsumer watch dog, or a watch dog in a computer tech magazine, they usually resolve problems quickly and to the customers satisfaction.

Were I am there is a magazine called APC, it has a watchdog section and when it publishes things and tries to contact the related party on the persons behalf they usually resolve all issues is amazingly fast time due to the fact that the company is getting bad press.

Hopefully you can find someone like that in the UK. Also, don't accept different brands or similar models, if they are going to give you a refurb or a 2nd hand replacement it HAS TO BE EXACTLY THE SAME. The idea of giving you a different brand different model graphics card is just plain silly.

Wish the best of luck to you....

[Driver 7]

Try and find a comsumer watch dog, or a watch dog in a computer tech magazine, they usually resolve problems quickly and to the customers satisfaction.

Totally. Maximum PC would be all over this. This is exactally what they print once a month on there watch dog reports. That would probably ruin them. Thats a bit harsh. But customer service is a must. Somehow when it comes to tech retail customer service seems to not be very important. There is a place close to me that gives great service with a smile. Because of that I have thrown in excess of $30 G's there way. I could not count the amount of places I have written off due to unsulting sales clerks who talk down to you and are blatently rude. I wonder why it is so common for tech retail.

[PhatSOB]

Maximum PC has a watchdog section in every issue, they also have a large forum on their website that has a Dog Pound area to vent about companies that you are having troubles with

http://www.maximumpc.com/forum/

[Augie]

Bob, would you mind posting this over at my site too.

Maxium PC would be a good place to go to also. dont forget about pc gamer they have been known to go after bad companies in the past.

[Bob The Junkie]

I don't think we get MaxPC over here, but I've had a look through the forums anyways :)

Thanks for all of the comments all, keep them coming. I'm sure Overclockers will like to know what you think of their service

I'll be sending them info of this tomorrow.

-BTJ

[Narnos]

What you will find is that instead of it "runining" them or giving them bad press etc, what they will actually do is replace your items with brand new ones as they should with little fuss and the customer service they should have been giving you all along.

Hopefully they will throw something in for your troubles or at least let you pay the difference to maybe get that 6600gt or 6800gt you wanted

[Steve1077]

I have to say that there customer support is no existent, even when you try to order over the phone you are kept waiting forever, I cant believe a company that trades online has no email address to write to in the event you have problems, also I sent them an order online and after a week of hearing nothing I sent 4 faxes, I got no reply to any of them, after trying to phone them for over 3 days I finally got through, I have to say I'm very reluctant to buy from them because of this

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