Confronting Newegg Face-to-Face
**Newegg Addresses Customer Service Concerns: A Detailed Overview**
In a recent interview with representatives from Newegg, including Terry Cox (VP of Customer Service), Andrew (Director of PR), and other executives, several issues were discussed regarding the company’s return policies and customer service practices. The discussion was extensive, covering topics such as RMAs, returns, and the overall customer experience. Below is a detailed account of the conversation, highlighting key points and the steps Newegg has taken to address these concerns.
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### **The Initial Tone: Nervousness and Preparation**
From the outset, it was evident that both sides entered the discussion with high stakes. The YouTuber expressed nervousness about performing well for their audience and ensuring a fair representation of Newegg’s policies. Similarly, the Newegg executives appeared tense, likely due to the sensitivity of the topic and the pressure to provide satisfactory answers.
The conversation began with a focus on the specific issue at hand: a rejected RMA (Returns Merchandise Authorization) and the subsequent problems faced by the YouTuber. The representatives from Newegg listened intently as the concerns were raised, acknowledging the gravity of the situation.
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### **Acknowledgments and Apologies**
Throughout the discussion, the Newegg executives repeatedly expressed apologies for the inconvenience caused. Terry Cox, in particular, emphasized that such issues should not occur and that customer satisfaction is a top priority for the company. He acknowledged that the process had gone awry and that steps needed to be taken to prevent similar incidents in the future.
The YouTuber was appreciative of the acknowledgment but stressed the importance of tangible actions rather than mere words. The executives agreed, stating their commitment to making meaningful changes to improve customer service.
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### **Immediate Changes Post-Interview**
Following the discussion, Newegg implemented several immediate changes:
1. **Opening a Dedicated Email Address**: A specialized email address was created for customers to report unresolved RMA issues. This move was seen as a positive step toward addressing past grievances and ensuring that future concerns are handled promptly.
2. **Expanded Return Policy**: The company expanded its open box and RMA return policy to include all items, not just motherboards and CPUs with bent pins. This decision was made to address the broader issue of customer dissatisfaction and ensure fairness in the return process.
3. **Re-evaluation of Past Cases**: Newegg began re-evaluating cases where customers had been denied RMAs or refunds, ensuring that these decisions were fair and justified. Several customers reported receiving approvals for their claims after this re-evaluation process.
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### **Challenges and Concerns**
While the changes were welcomed, there were concerns about the implementation of these policies. Specifically, it was noted that Newegg’s executives seemed more focused on avoiding further issues rather than addressing them head-on. This perceived disconnect from the ground level highlighted a broader issue within the company: a potential lack of alignment between upper management and frontline employees.
The discussion also revealed that Newegg had struggled with internal communication, leading to delays in resolving customer concerns. The YouTuber pointed out that such challenges often stem from a focus on internal matters, such as investor relations and stock market performance, rather than prioritizing the customer experience.
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### **Positive Developments and Future Outlook**
Despite these challenges, there were several positive developments:
- **Proactive Communication**: Newegg’s decision to open a dedicated email address for unresolved RMA issues was seen as a proactive step toward transparency and customer satisfaction.
- **Commitment to Improvement**: The executives reiterated their commitment to improving customer service practices. They acknowledged the need for continuous improvement and expressed willingness to engage with customers directly to resolve issues.
- **Engagement with Customers**: Newegg’s representatives emphasized their desire to build a stronger relationship with customers, ensuring that their voices are heard and their concerns addressed promptly.
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### **Call-to-Action for Customers**
The YouTuber encouraged viewers to share their experiences with Newegg, both positive and negative. This feedback will help gauge whether the company is making meaningful progress in improving its customer service policies. Those who have been affected by similar issues are urged to reach out to Newegg directly or provide details of their experiences to the YouTuber’s team for further evaluation.
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### **Conclusion**
The discussion highlighted both the challenges and opportunities facing Newegg as it strives to improve its customer service practices. While there were concerns about the company’s ability to translate words into actions, the immediate changes made post-interview demonstrate a commitment to addressing these issues.
As Newegg moves forward, the focus will be on ensuring that its policies are implemented consistently and fairly. By prioritizing customer satisfaction and fostering open communication, the company can work toward rebuilding trust with its customers and restoring its reputation as a reliable e-commerce platform.
For those interested in staying updated on Newegg’s progress or sharing their own experiences, the YouTuber’s channel remains an active resource for feedback and analysis.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis journey it wasn't easy all right they're waiting for us outside there's security the road to actually sit down with new Executives and discuss the issues was difficult and we felt like new was playing games with us up until the last possible second so you can film ignore my email and hopefully that won't be public uh you can film all you want outside this is Terry Cox and you can film pleas to meet you so you can film all you want outside and then no filming except for our conference room so no filming as you walk okay is that we'll keep it pointed at the floor while we walk in okay no I want a record of everything for for your guys s too I'll explain why after our first video of its questionable RMA practices n invited a conversation via phone and when we took newag up on it by alerting it in advance of showing up at its headquarters that we would like to talk the company agreed to the meeting and knew our plan was to film it fully transparently for our audience we landed in California with the meeting on the calendar having flown across the country and we shot the next video praising new egg and saying that we looked forward to the meeting because we wanted to help new EG to provide some competition in the market not just go in there and Flame it for an obvious mistake that we had already talked about a lot but after filming our previous video and before publishing it we received another email from Newegg with a very different tone it told us now that filming and audio would not be allowed on its property there are weasel words here we could have employed like okay we can go across the street but this looked as if newag was trying to test us at the last minute or if we give them the benefit of the doubt it was acting in fear we genuinely wanted to have a real conversation with newag to try and give the company a chance to answer for itself and improve itself this Epic Journey was brought to you by us and the GN store at store. Camas nexus.net our Fierce Independence is made possible by your purchases of our fully custom highquality products like our HUD black and red desk-sized mouse mats these Mouse mats have custom vibrant red anti-fray stitching at the borders Red Rubber Underside and highresolution print also check out our 3D component drink coasters with exceptionally unique details and highquality rubbers support your drinks while showing off this awesome hobby our large PC Building modm mats are back in stock now and shipping as well and they're the market leader in rugged work surfaces for computer and tear down projects for extreme heat resistance durability and utility with things like internet wiring diagrams cable pinouts and screw tracking GDs our toolkits are also in stock and shipping Now useful for GPU tear Downs or PC Building you can visit store. Gamers access.net to help us fund our future projects like this one and our test equipment while getting something quality in return our sincerest thanks to everyone who has supported us in any way for those of you who have Micro Center or some other alternative to newag and Amazon that's great but a lot of people including us really don't and we don't want Amazon to just become a monopoly and that's why after going back and forth on whether we should even publish that previous video we ultimately decided to publish it and hold Newegg to its promise since that's what we filmed the video under the premise of even though the promise had changed now after publishing that video presumably because we expressed General positivity and uh excitement to engage with new and potentially see an improvement and probably also because of the community response in the comments that was positive towards the acceptance of the upcoming meeting newag without telling us went back on its going back on its promise and decided it would meet with us after all on camera with audio so to recap how we got here before we proceed newag invited a phone conversation we took it further and we notified them that we'd be flying out instead with cameras newag accepted the meeting they then notified us no cameras would be allowed even though they already agreed to it they then went back on the going back of that and reneged the reeg which is maybe appropriate given the stock symbol of newag so important as we get into this as always there will be chapters in the description if you want to jump around but the biggest thing the reason this video is long yes we know but it's not longwinded is because we didn't want to make any cuts to the interview so going into this we wanted to make sure everything was represented as it happened in real life so neither party questions the outcome of the video newag has nothing to ask about why did you cut XYZ the audience doesn't have anything to ask about and we make sure everyone was represented fully transparently that was our objective that's why it was so important for us to bring the camera to the meeting because of just a closed doors meeting that doesn't really achieve the goal of bringing transparency to the issue of new 's return and customer service processes so in spite of how truly bad newag made itself look in the runup to all this we still wanted to be fair to them we gave newag the benefit of the doubt that maybe the company's panicking and acting in fear and so we sort of brushed that aside and decided to still go through at the meeting be direct be fair and not just flame it for something that we've already published multiple times now because our goal is giving Newegg a chance to improve itself it's really not fair to just attack without giving an opportunity to improve because then there's never any incentive for the subjects even get screwed up to improve this is maybe just a microcosm for the world in general so we wanted to extend that opportunity to new EG because it would just be better for all of you all our viewers and their customers if it can improve itself and do things the right way so we are including everything plus our own wrapup at the end that means you can watch the entire interview start to finish and make your own decision on what you think of Newegg statements and if it is improving or if it's making the changes that you want it to make additionally we will have our own recap at the end so you can jump to that one as well or you can jump around to the chapters for the key topics in the interview if you want to see what we think about the whole issue when we opened the email account egg Gamers nexus.net asking for well documented evidence of your own issues getting money back from New EG for selling you defective products or wrong products we received hundreds of emails in just 36 hours and we never even announced it in a video that was just with Twitter and YouTube Community posts which are far lower reach so that tells you something about the scope of the problem and that's why we're focused on The Wider issue for everybody in the community not just on our problem we didn't want to give Newegg the opportunity to say it's a one-off because it's clearly not but we do want to afford newag the opportunity to make things right and to make sure this doesn't happen again there've already been some policy changes coming out of this interview we tweeted about those recently we'll talk about them at the end of this video as well but for now let's get started here's the uncut interview with new's four high ranking employees okay just a quick anyway I guess since there's four of you guys if you don't mind just going around introducing just so everyone knows absolutely absolutely okay hey Steve again I'm Terry Cox I'm the vice president customer service here at Newegg uh in charge of all customer service operations um been with company about 6 months and one of the uh tasks I'm charged with doing is identifying issues like yours uncovering them digging down and seeing what we can do to provide a more positive experience to the customer and with that I'll hand it off to Don uh don gizak Vice President of Operations um I have both the transportation department as well as the Fulfillment group um the return center and Logistics falls under the Fulfillment group um been with new egg for three years my name is Eric W I'm director of public relations I've been with the company for one month um but I have two decades of experience in video game PR Tech PR um just to be upfront we're going to be 100% honest answer every question you have there's some questions we can't answer as a public company if we don't know the answer we're going to tell you we don't know the answer but I built a 25 year career on not lying we will not be l so pass it off to Vince cool nice to meet you guys um I'm Vince agular I am the director of platform experience um I just started this role recently um in this role uh I work with Business Leaders across the organization to uh focus on projects and different initiatives to improve our shopping experiences across our platforms such as our new.com website new business abs and so forth um I've been with the organization for 19 years going um this June um the first 18 and a half years uh I was dedicated to customer service and so I've kind of spent my entire career at New Egg here in customer service and now I get to serve um our business just with other um project related you know uh initiatives to help improve our platforms cool um so the let's see the first see the thought we had is just addressing your videos yeah just because that'll probably answer all your questions if we took you through what happened because what you what happened is is bad and we want to talk to you through all the steps and what went on because we've investigated it's we we're not we have nothing to defend it was a lot of errors were made and we want to explain to you what happened and that might help you understand and I'm I'm definitely fine with that um I'm my primary goal isn't to be here for my issue it's to be here for sort of The Wider issue of of similar things happening sure so I'm for sure open to hearing more about what happened specifically in that case but uh but we had a lot of people reach out to us in the last we opened an email account specifically for receiving these things and I mean some of the I can work with the people who emailed us as well and if you want to receive them directly I can maybe forward them at some point absolutely for the people who are willing to do that um but anyway the the main goal I think from my end was to make sure uh we talk about the wider issue and not just the specific motherboard if you want to talk about it start with that because I think it was really bad and you're a customer and we care about your customer experience so let's start that okay Eric thanks yeah for guiding that that direction okay yeah well what I'd like to say is um since the initial tweet that's the first time it came across my desk thanks for letting us know like wholeheartedly we we don't do the best job at times in your example of getting these the first time through obviously we can go back to the actual RMA issue itself and Don can speak more about that but once it was brought to one of our team members you blocked his name out but we know who it is and you know he he didn't didn't follow up right so you're contacting new he did some chats and essentially you're being told no we're not going to help you so what we're looking at doing is letting you know that that's not you know even one customer not with a huge followership but any customer that gets through and isn't taken care of the right way it's not okay for us so thanks for bringing it to our attention because of your followership it got to my desk right and we absolutely want to just take a minute and say we're sorry yeah I think the the big takeaway there too is it shouldn't have to get to your desk correct obviously so I don't know if there's I don't know the organization know well enough if there's sort of like a um a CMO type of person or whoever would kind of be at the top of the hierarchy but over customer service but ultimately it seems like there should be some sort of check where in the very least you you don't start with assuming the customer's lying I guess I don't know cuz I run a store too it's not as as high Revenue as New Egg yeah we don't ship as many things but we ship a pretty good amount of stuff and our general policy is to start with assuming an Earnest Customer because it almost never goes poorly right it's just like worst case you give someone fraudulent a free motherboard and I I don't think that will be exploited too often you know and uh and you put systems in in place to try and prevent it anyway yeah but just it it kind of I think and that's the this is actually one quarter of the emails that I received in the last 36 hours um most we vetted these most of these are related to the same type of thing where it's customers sort of assumed to be lying yeah or assumed to have caused the damage in the very least so I guess like I appreciate that uh that there was care once that got to your desk but also Newegg has too many customers for all of them to have to go to you no exactly and and so what I would say to that is identifying them quickly um and what I would like to say to your your you know followers and any potential customers of ours is anytime somebody doesn't get a five-star experience they need to speak to a manager or supervisor you know similarly to if I was in a restaurant and I my server wasn't taking care of me I'm going to ask for the manager now we would prefer to change the policies to where we're not assuming and we're you know quickly I can skip forward and say we we messed up you know it's several failure points in your case but as an example to others and uh any opportunity that we have to be made aware of that even on more of like a first line of defense from the customer service professional to their immediate supervisor or the corporate escalations team that you've been dealing with we want to resolve those issues quickly and learn from this mistake and admit it you know we definitely have some room to improve right um so I mean I guess the the first question I really wanted to ask is maybe it's an easy one I don't know it depends I guess but fairly straightforward which is you Amazon I said this in the other video uh is very well known for its return policy for customer relations shipping speed ease of access shipping price which their strategy is a whole separate topic but it's pretty amazing how they've made people expect that shipping cost 0 and that's hard for other retailers right so I guess the the question on sort of new side of things is ultimately with that as the competitor what is uh the the real reason or the core reason someone should buy from Newegg ABS absolutely and with Vince's experience I think he can speak well to the process improvements that we've been making prior to this uh your particular issue to improve the customer experience and that's kind of his Department Vince would you like to tackle that question yeah so thank you that's a good question um you know we're we've stayed firm in our commitment to deliver the best shopping experience we could offer our Shoppers you know over the years we've grown we've added new products we've offered different services and specifically over the last two years um with very instrumental feedback from our customers we've made some significant improvements and few of those things I can speak about um which are in 2020 um we've launched uh on our website our ability for our customers to get their third- party Marketplace orders uh returns online so being able to create those returns online previously they had to contact customer service so we really wanted to make it an easier shopping experience um within that same year we also updated one of our return policies which was the we added the zero zero dead pixel policy which that meant customers who purchased Monitor and television products um could return them uh 100% hassle-free with as little as one dead pixel so this was something that was a sticking point for our customers and you know we made it an we made an effort to change that policy because we want to make sure we're giv a great shopping experience um fast forward to 2021 we uh we launched our live chat bot so which this which this allowed our customers to get some really in uh immediate customer service um whether to track their package check their order status request a return report a delivery issue online 24 hours a day and if they need to speak with the human they have that ability to do so very quickly um we also launched our ability on the website for customers to report their delivery issues on the website because prior to that they had to contact customer service they needed to go through some more effort so we really focused on how to make our website a very easy shopping experience and then we also made some changes to one of our large item delivery uh uh policies where a c if a customer received a damaged product um they needed to report those damages within two business days we've updated that to match our our normal 14 business days so we have a consistent shopping experience for those customers that buy large item deliveries um and then lastly we proudly launched our Newegg uh 30-day hasslefree returns in 2021 which means that customers that buy products that are sold and shipped from new EG that carry that um hassle-free return badge can return their product with no restocking fees we cover the return shipping for products up to 50s um and you know these were some of the things that we just we learned from our customers our customers are so important to us and we really care about their shopping experience and you know we're looking at how others in the field are doing it and we want to make sure that we're competitive and we're delivering on that commitment so it sounds like the the policies are reasonably positioned are in the right place or come from the right place at least um based on just the what I've read through from viewers and what we've experienced then I don't think those policies are coming across to the customer so maybe that's the disconect so so with that you know we talk about the procedures and the standard operating procedures and the process in which we use to deliver on those commitments and to leverage those policies and that's where we saw that's where we saw the break right so so what is what is the SOP for like post purchase for dealing with the customer post purchase once you have their money once uh and they encounter an issue what's the step-by-step customer contacts new EG says I have X issue what happens internally before you answer the direct question I want to speak on a higher level too I think the sentiment that you're feeling is that might might be new might be other customers as well but it's the general feeling that ah you're wrong we're going to prove it to you and it could be viewed as some sort of deflection technique or there's pressures you come it's another thing from some of your videos and and others is where is that pressure coming from uh I think it's a general underlying pressure to be efficient you know we we ask our people to perform at certain levels and what we need to do is take care that we've got oversight and that one things we're speaking about um whatever the number is hundreds thousands whatever it is the sheer volume of of orders and the customers that are satisfied being careful not to minimize the impact that this has had on you and many other people out there uh aren't being represented and again I want to go back to even one customer is too many so if we've got policies in place and he can speak to those because he's been here for majority of his career what what can we do to enforce them and make sure we're not applying too much pressure for efficiency and the quality is being improved so I think that's the focus of where where can we get our team members and that's where I'm going to tell you we are going to mess up uh we have messed up one of the uh I think yeah and and this so a much more extreme example of we've messed up from a company yeah would be uh I hate to just like name them out of nowhere but uh I'll I'll anonymize it a little bit but there was a fire hazard issue there were multiple fire hazard issues but there was a fire hazard issue we covered last year and um that was a a great example of C uh customer runs into a very serious problem company messed up the company didn't resolve it properly but then you have fractal for example with the torrent case they also had a potential fire hazard issue and that's really Ser that's a lot more serious than sorry you got a motherboard with benett pins um but uh this is an instance where company messed up and then they got in front of it they recalled all the items they fixed the engineering they sent it out to press completely transparently so I think it's fine for a company to mess up and I I think our viewers understand that at this point um it's just about how is it dealt with right and on this end like the fact that I can get here is great but um this can't happen for hundreds or or many people at least hundreds in our audience no no that's a great example and I mean safety is Paramount to you know your health and livelihood I I think finances though are I don't want to say equally important but they're right up there the power of your purchase um if the company that you're purchasing from takes it seriously so some of these particular instances are where we need to change that view from our team members internally you know my team members are my customers my internal customers and if I'm going to take care of them and give them that right leadership and let them know that we care about them they can in turn share that empathy to to the customers calling in and so that's where one specific that we've done is we've gone back and looked at open box motherboards may have been a part of our press release we've gone back and looked at o open box motherboards and CPUs and Have Not only already begun contacting we've already gone through the last year a couple of them this year and maybe whoever it was I don't want to get the numbers I don't even know specifics but I have been confirmed that we've already issued refunds to any CPU or motherboard bent pin rejected on the on the return side so that's just one for for the open ones yeah that's one small step that we can do to make some reparations similar to the recalls but um yeah moving forward this has helped us adjust that policy so what is the SOP then for dealing with uh a customer who claims an issue like this absolutely so the the new standard operating procedure is to contact us either through the website like you had done or having to pick up once they're you know told well they won't be told that they're rejected so Don's team my team once the information comes in and it gets received we're going to look at that and automatically approve it there's no questions asked there and I think you know just going back to what you had said like so we've made positive policy changes I think your customer or your viewers are customers can see that right obviously you had a bad experience um so the policies are very competitive I think they're getting to where we need to be with the hassle fore return and all that um you know in this particular case other cases that have come come through you know there's the policy and then there's the procedure that needs to be followed in order for the policy to work so this is where we found the breakdown right um so in our return center we have redundancies along the way to that should be preventing these and I think it is preventing the vast majority of um issues that we have are open box or referb items kept in the same warehouse as new items they're kept in the same warehouse but they're kept in completely separate areas okay so if you see a warehouse like literally of 200,000 square feet um the new items are here and we keep the open box on the other side of the building completely separate completely different conveyor line so there's no possible way that a new item in an open box could be mistakenly picked okay I I have seen that happen in a few of these like few of the emails we've gotten so yeah one viewer bought um this was a couple years ago bought a 20 80 TI end up receiving a 680 TI open box item yeah I don't recall if if he said Newegg resolved the issue or not but the fact that it happened again is points to a process issue so and part of the process issue is or the part part of the process is um we have agents identifying right whether this is going to go back in as new to stock or if it's going to go back in as an open box to stock or if it's going to go damaged and go to ew do agents look at every item that comes back in when it's returned from a customer yes physical inspection like actually open the box and look at it right so we have two yeah so when we have um we have a receiving department on our um center right and as the as everything's unloaded from our carriers trailers or trucks we scan it verifying that we have the return um that we've received it right so then what it does is it goes through our Frontline agents okay and those Frontline agents are fed their returns through a conveyor system and what they do is they open the outside box obviously and they do a a manual inspection of has this been opened or is it brand new if it's brand new there's no damage to the Box they immediately accept the RMA and then they send back to New Stock if there's any exception any exception they don't have a they don't have rights to deny an RMA front line if there's any exception whether they see damage whether um the arm is incomplete which you know you run you know there's supposed to be three items only two got returned any exception goes to a second tier where another visual inspection um is done they try to figure out what the issue is and then at that point even the second tier in the RLC doesn't have rights to deny the RMA so at that point what they do is we submit a ticket basically going to customer service so that ticket when we do that we identify the reason code missing item wrong item missing accessory damaged right and they're doing the inspection on the spot there they submit a ticket and depending on the reason code they answer a set amount of questions you know most of them being yes and no um and then a lot of and then there's a section at the bottom does this need any additional comments anything else that customer service needs to know to make a decision and we have the ability to upload a picture if need be so at that point the ticket then goes to the customer service team he has a team that is investigating the different type of exceptions does the do the kpis fall on the Cs team ultimately for rejections um they do but what I'd like to to add to this is that right now we're talking about a process um it's not necessarily administrative or clerical it does require a certain level of decision- making to look a little bit deeper uh has this customer spent you know money with us are they a new customer you know what we do by that so is that already part of the process looking at the CER cust history it it's becoming a part of the process I was say that's the problem that's the number thing we one thing we do you know and I've got one guy who does shipping and one who does customer service right it's the first thing we do is if because not just of have they earned a status yeah but it's also it's one of the quickest gauges of right you know customers sometimes the story just it it's a little weird and you get this Vibe where you're like I don't know if they're lying maybe this person is lying to me but a really quick gauge of who cares if they're lying is they've spent thousands of dollars so it's not even about the amount of money is we have the ability to see how much they spent how if they have an account with us how long the account's been open how frequently they purchase um we have the ability to look at their return history to say you know they've returned something once a year we never had an issue with them but they've ordered 50 things and they returned one thing or hey in the last 30 days they've ordered 100 products and they've returned 99 of them we have the ability to see all that and that's part of the investigation that his team and his team do when they make these right yeah it sounds like some of the policies what I'm hearing so far is either the policies are good intentioned and poorly executed maybe in some cases or some of the policies like checking customer history are coming in really late to a company that's 20 years old plus yeah so that that's that's been in place okay um that has been in place you know I think so you're back to poor execution yeah let me give you an example we trying to elev poor execution right is in in most of these cases that's what it is and yours particular let's just go Um there was there was errors that happen with it going back to open box MH an era um now when it came back to us when I explained to you how we answer like the 10 questions right those are requ nine of the 10 questions are required right all the yes and knows that additional information that was would have been needed for yours is hey this had recently been sent back to a vendor it was it was damaged it has this sticker on it like we know it was we know so what happened is there was no additional in this particular case no additional information put in question 10 there was no picture uploaded right so when that ticket was submitted what it did is it went to his team right so his team looked at the the answers right and to them it was a standard case of we sent this out nothing was wrong with it and it came back with B pins everything checked off it was a standard case of we're suspecting that the customer did the damage yes yeah I guess two improvements there then are someone on on this secondary team maybe should go get the item and look at it yeah ideally you don't have multiple employees doing the same job for a lot of reason but reasons but um depending on the quantity I mean newegg's statement on Twitter claims that the occurrence of these issues the frequency of them is low and that it's a low maybe the percentage is low but um as an absolute number it starts to cause problems obviously online but if the occurrence of incident is low then I would think it would be justifiable to have someone in a position on on the Cs team to say hey maybe I should go pick this thing up because the customer insisting XYZ right yeah let me speak to that and and with regards to you know marketing public relations and our Twitter you know the the idea is that we're we're looking at this and I think adding that adjective of a low or small number Paints the wrong picture you know I'm here today uh and Don's here today to tell you as are all of us there's improvements that need to be made you know clearly and instead of minimizing the number you know even if it is a percentage of total volume which might appear low depending on that perspective these are real people right spending their hard earned money and that's in from a customer service perspective that's what I want to focus on each and every time can we get somebody to go grab those can we Elevate the execution when it's being rejected the customers that look for that purchase and they're fine great the ones that return and we approve the return relatively you know hassle-free and quickly like we should with hopefully very few exceptions excellent but what about the people in a similar case um where we're saying no we can't that's where we think we can Elevate the execution so that's where our focus is right now right yeah it it sounds like Pol I think what I'm hearing is at the executive or management level executive and management teams come up with or work with other team members to come up with these policies that have all the right language in them and and the right outlines for the start of the process and the end of it uh uh but then once it gets down to the team's handling the details of it the policies are being ignored and and I can add some context here where um we had a number of of Newegg employees and former New EG employees reach out to us with uh why they thought there were some issues in the process and um I think the main thing I was seeing was uh it's not that it's necessary there's one employee making all the mistakes it's that there's either too much pressure on things like kpis where the the pressure to meet certain targets is landing on the wrong individual maybe it should land higher up maybe maybe instead of hey these people are processing too many uh refunds or or creating too much loss maybe it's not their fault maybe it's the PM's fault or whoever's bringing the product in they need to establish with the manufacturer of the product hey this thing has high DOA or o you know a return rate can we get a a more generous policy from the manufacturer to allow New Egg to return it to the manufacturer instead of putting the pressure on the low level in 815 to18 an hour individual who's just going to go this isn't worth losing my job rejected let someone else deal with it yeah so let me answer the first question there so um so the changes that we're that we're talking about making from a procedural standpoint right um you know part of what what my Approach is and it's always been with the organization I've been with is it's always the bottom up I've spent multiple days you know since this whole thing has happened talking to the Associates on the floor that have act that actually do the job and looking at the system and how they're clicking things and saying hey how did this really happen like what would have prevented this is this just an honest mistake like I can tell you that um it is an honest it wasn't malicious we're not scamming you we're not scamming our other customers why would we do that right um we need you guys um so but how do we stop ourselves from making these honest mistakes honest errors and the the answer is not going to come from me um you know sitting in an office it's kind of come from the people that do it every day and say see if I just did this it would go into new instead of damage right you know what I mean how do we separate that process yeah and one of the notes we got said um noted that there were certain forms and procedures that the teams expected to follow that comes from management and then some of the the lower level teams may follow their own process or forms instead because they disagree with the ones from management yeah and now you have a mess right those have to have Toge maybe maybe theirs are better maybe yours are better but if no one's following the same process none of it there is no process yeah so um I mean if if I were to I like to go into meetings with an idea of of some kind of improvement even if I don't have any insight internally to what's going on but it sounds like there has to be a way for the people making the again the policy sounds good but there has to be a way for you guys and whoever else is on the executive team to talk with the people who are who are back there processing everything in a way where they don't feel threatened to offer suggestions right yeah and and that's and that is our process the policy is always going to come from management you know the business case we we do obviously it's open door policy um we're not a large we're not a huge company right um we know everybody by first name so um you know the policies are there but the procedures really are coming from the bottom up and who's the user who's the user we make sure everybody understands the policy and then we're going to the Frontline agents the supervisors maybe the manager and saying do we make sure that our procedures can meet this policy um even when everything aligns and everything is like Hey we're perfect there's there's still going to be errors there's still going to be errors someone still has a bad day you know someone gets distracted um that's still going to happen and to your point and why you're here right is when those errors happen or when right that how do we address how do we how do we make right I do think that just again based on my observ of the issue externally it seems like more than JN is having a bad day so he rejected the return um I I'm a little weary of throwing sort of one or two team members under the bus yeah and when I say a bad day I don't mean like he's maliciously doing it be like I had a you know he just made an era he's not maliciously doing it to to a certain degree Steve this is an open conversation we we'd like to and this is something I was it sounds like you might have something to add I would genuinely you know I'd love to hear what what would you based on what you're hearing know you're here go ahead I mean you're our customer we appreciate your feedback I think tell us what you think you know one thing I would like to I would really like to see is it's great that going forward there's supposed to be better uh especially open box or reer bares there's issues with new items too but yeah I'll keep it focused for now um you've mentioned ing out to some customers in the past uh about issues similar to the ones we were talking about where okay maybe we're going to look at their case again um I don't know do you have a timeline how far back you're looking for those so far we've gone through all of 2021 okay the results just came in yesterday they were 100% effective everybody we've reached out has replied back in a very short period of time 100% do you have a quantity how many people yeah I don't know are we supped we're not allowed to disclose that I think there's certain with you know public filings I'm not trying to hide behind certain but I I asked if I could offer that information was told to refrain from percentages or specifics but what I can say is that if you are watching this or if you know of you know an email and you haven't been contacted you know it might not have been an open box that's where our focus is right now but if you feel that there's something that we should be able to do for you the easiest way is to go to our website you know like anybody like you did talk to one of our team members customer service reps and if they're not able to assist you and they say oh this has already been handled ask for a supervisor yeah I'd like to make a suggest so as as a an unfortunate customer of spectrum and AT&T uh I've like many other people have The Misfortune of you you get worn down by going through the process over and over yeah and my suggestion and I I do think from from a PR standpoint this would look great if you do this is to open a specific inbox or a specific line I I do think an email would be the easiest everyone but a specific inbox uh for looking at these specific instances so either either past issues so you know you mentioned 2021 okay um but uh in case someone's fallen through the cracks AB you you have something targeted where they don't have to go through the normal chat lines they don't have to explain to the agent six times and get escalated and explain it uh yeah know it would be great and without making you a commitment right here I will you know it's already been disc discussed and we've got some people that are looking into the idea and seeing if we can make that happen and if so is there a chance we can get a commitment we cannot because we're a public company so we can't speculate in the future but we like your idea yeah so without committing what I'd like to say is that I'm working with the team members and advocating for some sort of specialized open you know something that we can tailor mate and custom um that can say hey if you're a new a customer you to email me a commitment before this video goes up sometime in the next few days I I'll I'll make it uh I'll make it a priority to get the answer yes or no we'll put it on the screen if you know if we get something yeah again we we because doing that or something similar or directing them through the proper channels would basically like you said for PR or whatever it would basically say look we really do have an open door policy we we want you to come to us I want any customer we feel that by delivering on a higher level of customer service we're going to get repeat customers if we're taking care of you you're going to want to come back and Shop with us and so it just makes sense is there is there a reason for only doing motherboards and the CPUs and the uh the new open box and referb policy in terms of what's what's taken back with low hassle or or no questions well yeah right now what we're doing is specifically with the bent pins issue or or the CPUs or motherboards but would we expand that we're also considering that we're wanting to find out as Vince was detailing how we can make it a more comprehensive customer experience it it seems like to me the simplest thing is if if you are if you're selling open box and reer items you're taking an inherent risk and you can either have a cumbersome amount of processes before the product goes back out the door to make sure it has everything or it's going to pass yeah right or you can make it cheaper and easier for newag and and also the customer and just say anything open box or refurb you have X many days maybe maybe it's 14 instead of 30 right where maybe part of buying open box is there's a there's a note says open box hey are policy is a little different we'll take it back you have a little bit fewer days mhm but we'll take it back um I that to me when when it's only motherboards and only CPUs it looks like a cop out I think to be honest like it's great that that's there but it is sort of like why not everything else okay okay I appreciate that feedback honestly it just seems like it would and ultimately I mean I have one really good example of a customer that I think this this should speak to management really more than anything where this particular customer had the short version is um the customer opened an RMA sent the item back uh on the grounds of the item being the incorrect items not what he ordered and the RMA was getting voided or cancelled for the reason of the RMA so in other words it came back the team says this isn't the right item in the box and then rejects it except that's the reason the Army was open exactly so they're stuck in a in a a i I can tell you me finish this the the big thing with this particular case though and some of the others we've looked at this user did eventually get their money back but they were in contact with Newegg for 7 weeks calling and messaging almost daily how much does that cost Newegg exactly to pay a customer service rep to sit there and deal with this guy every day for seven weeks at some point you've exceeded the value of the item oh no well far exceeded I don't know the specific cost right Vince Vince was just uh talking to me about this and Vince feel free to to chime in I think it was the first week I had joined the organization a similar story you know one of these horror stories where it was uh item received was not what I ordered and you know trying to return it it again it was very similar I had to jump on the phone I felt that to understand the customer perspective Vince can take you through how we're making improvements to prevent that from happening um what what do we how have we changed to allow the customers to like this to go from seven weeks to maybe a few days where it gets escalated to a team member we're making a decision and we're able to satisfy the customer needs yeah so um what I can say is that you know the team is going to go through the process of validating what that issue is right and so U my understanding is there's you know they we work with our warehouse teams to look at our inventory um we look we work with our pm M teams the purchasers to understand what was being advertised um and sometimes we have to go steps further to go and check with the manufacturer or even our distributor depending on what that may be um and we need to take those steps to validate what that might be and this could be a $2,500 gift uh VGA card it could be a high value product um but in terms of the time to follow up with the customer you know I think we all can agree that that is beyond way too long um we strive for our first Contact resolution we want our process to be well defined and and and work in a way that is going to deliver the results and and be timely with it because we value our customers time and certainly it doesn't make sense to drag it out this long but um there are processes in place to validate those um and and the one thing I also want to say you know some of the processes that we're talking about these are processes for products sold and shipped by Newegg that are forfill through our fulfillment centers and our return Logistics centers we also offer that Marketplace experience and the products that are sold and shipped by those sellers they have their own return process total different story all of these are sold and shipped by new okay got it um the the marketplace I I don't even want to get into but uh I I think you all are are aware of similar issues happening there I mean yeah to some extent you're taking a you're taking as a buyer you're taking a risk buying from someone who's effectively selling on a version of eBay you know um so I I don't even that's that would make this go too long so these are all sold and shipped by Newegg so you know I'm and I'm not sure I I think Vince were we're we're scratching at the surface but I think we need to dig deep so one thing that we need to do and that we're I don't I don't even know again this is an area where I think we need to say hey we need to make this a higher priority with this customer the example that I gave it was a customer who had bought a I don't I'm going to make this up right now I think it might have been like a 3070 but they got a 3090 GPU and he he said it it was what he was looking for for some other reason he wanted to return it and we said no that was the wrong item in the Box it was literally a more expensive item which didn't make sense yeah I I've seen a few like that too yeah yeah and so I got involved we looked at it and again it was declined because it didn't match up and it took somebody to make a decision to realize customer history other things that we should already be doing that we might not be so I think maybe maybe that that to me if when I'm dealing with any kind of management that to me would sound like maybe the process is it's either too rigid or there's a management or or higher level reason that the people on the ground don't care um and I say management or higher level because I I don't want it to be just like it's that guy's fault today but probably that comes from somewhere higher up ultimately a company hired the person they have the policies maybe the policy is too rigid where all they're looking at is name of item name of other item not the same rejected right and and there's no further thought because perhaps the kpis or or whatever they're judged on are too um high pressure to where they feel like they have to push them through as fast as they can and I if I were in that position if someone tells me you need to push through however many to get to clear this que today I'm going to look for the most efficient way to do that that I think has pretty high accuracy and in that scenario it's going to be I look at the sheet maybe I don't know even what the products are right but I see 3090 I see 3070 therefore not the same rejected right so maybe too much rigidity or too high pressure for performance uh something like that yeah yeah yeah I don't know that that would be I'm trying to look at it too from an employee level where even though the policy comes from the top and the work is is ground up um it it there's a reason that that uh teams of people will make what are perceived as mistakes and if it's coming at this frequency I don't think it's just one employee I think I think it's again either too much rigidity or no one's on the same page so I I guess if like if I were going to go through suggestions you know i' I'd love a commitment sounds like I won't get it but on opening an email inbox specifically for dealing with I don't rule it out yet give us give us a be all and I think we should also mention that we do have our Newegg service Twitter so that's one that our customers can absolutely right now it's active they can reach out to us um and if I'm seeing the action from our branding team our social team they're actually following up with a lot of customers who are leaving comments online um that's something we pride ourselves on doing which is keeping our ear to the internet and making sure that we're engaging with customers who are engaging With Us online right whether they're tweeting us at new EG or they're on other various social channels like we want to engage with those customers we care about their feedback we only improve based on the feedback from our customers and you know this is really important to us so I mean um ultimately when when you guys walk away from the meeting here what is it you think you're going to be talking about you know what out of all of this returns returns and and I don't know you know uh to what extent I can provide value ultimately because I'm sure a lot of these things have been discussed the team is large enough and experienced enough but um I guess what I'm getting after is there's certain commitments that can't be made because of laws that I don't understand because they're SEC laws that's fine I can't really challenge that right I don't know I don't know those laws but um I guess at least what are if you could truncate the list to these are the key things we want to go talk to our teams about what does that list look like sure I'll I'll yeah let me feel this one guys so it's it's ultimately we discussed it briefly but to make it a little bit more concise if a customer is going to contact customer service we're able to give them a favorable response right that Frontline team member should be empowered to go ahead and handle that it's a favorable response customers going to be happy if they're less than five star experience and we're working that into some of our scripting basically then we want to escalate that to a tier two or an actual supervisor that's our first line of defense if you contact us I heard the phone call originally you were the less than satisfied had to ask the gentleman when can I expect a call back you know things like that are indicators that hey I don't know it let me get somebody that can help you we want to let you walk out of the new egg store in the form of either a live chat or a phone without satisfying you know the if it makes sense or at least getting somebody that's a decision maker so um the escalation of uh negative issues is a key priority to us right now anytime we're going to have to tell a customer no sorry can't can't do this we want somebody with more decision-making skills and empowerment not the person being pushed by certain kpis how many calls can you take and whatever these kpis may you know be uh that that's that's the number one on the returns process side Don's doing similar and he can speak to that basically engaging with his team making sure that the Frontline supervisors are grabbing these more often whether it's pressure or you I'm not going to call anybody on our team you know unmotivated I don't think that's it but there's something that we need to unlock that so that's that's the first one um did you want to add to any of that yeah I just you know from an operation side I think the most important thing is you know everyone's seen your videos and everybody's you know a lot of our people follow you yeah um like I said you know we're not we're not a a company that has 500,000 employees right um we're a company that has you know couple thousand right so when they see a video about our return center and an error that was made in our return center you know this error is pointed like you said I know I like that you're keeping it higher because this is like an error or two errors or whatever it is it is like very definable to like one person and you know the people that we have they're committed they're passionate with what they do um and we don't want to point it to one person it's a process era that we made not one person made we made right I mean even that board went through three times so I don't know if it's the same people you know but yeah for sure at some point it's like come on guys get it together no we get it and I think the biggest take away you know from from you know this right especially this is our folks want to be involved in the solution they have the best ideas they know exactly what they did to click this versus click that or you know this restrains them from you know preventing it or stopping the flow of the package on the spot so they want to be involved um you know that's our commitment is to get them involved for sure because they'll have the best solution for us and we're grateful to you for exposing this error it was you know a gap in our process we Endeavor to be the best technology e-commerce company in the globe in the world and improve every day and it's a complex business and and we're going to make mistakes still but we Endeavor to be the best we want to win the the customers back that have become disenfranchised who have left us you've been a customer of ours for over a decade you spent quite a bit of money and we should have not had this process three different accounts too we yeah so your videos should not have been made because we should have never made those errors but and we should have probably released our statement earlier but we're here now we're glad to meet with you address it and make improvements but if it does happen again that's back to what can we do about it how how can we you know speed that up not to seven weeks not to have to go through multiple contacts and again don't don't rule out that we might put out a special email um but in the meantime you know we still have that 800 number if you do need to speak to a supervisor we just encourage everybody to do that right I personally know the names of all of the supervisors and their managers and customer service most of them have been to my house for barbecue or tacos so again we're these are my internal customers and if I'm going to expect them to give you and the rest of the customers good service we're taking care of them and we're going to find out how we can speed up these escalations process so if another person misses it well hey we got your back you know we're going to take care of you awesome and and just to add Steve you know you asked what are we going to do after this you know we're going to continue on our mission which is based on that commitment to delivering the best shopping experience you know as someone who started here taking phone calls you know early in my career um I've seen this company evolve um as being part of the customer service department um being part of the team who's handling these calls s working with our customers I've had the privilege to speak with really great customers who gave us really instrumental feedback to help us identify how we can get better um and that's that commitment we're going to continue moving forward um because as Don mentioned you know our employees are really critical to this operation our customers are and for new EG our customers and our employees are the most important parts of this brand so we will continue on that commitment well you know and with growing uh I won't mention any competitors names Steve but with Growing Pains uh customer service suffers even some of thep companies that are our direct competitors that used to be known for Stellar service and they're still building it's it's hard to chase some of these competitors with how quick and easily it is to do certain things but even their customer service metrics have have dipped some of the sentiment that I've been seeing as well is oh New Egg used to be well we we want them to know we want you to know that we've got people that are passionate we're genuinely interested I I'm sure that that's coming across but how well we execute will remain to be seen and the improvements um you know we we hope that you'll see a difference and we'll sure we're pretty sure we'll be hearing from you in yeah I I think the the sort of like on the closing side of things the only speaking completely frankly um I think the big thing for your teams or or this particular you you all to be aware of is uh there's a lot of action that has to be done there's a lot of talking we have done but I I would just be wary of I don't know to to be honest the way that I think viewers will perceive a lot of this is actions matter Executives high paid Executives maybe or directors or VPS um doing what directors VPS and PR do which is use a lot of really well chosen words without really concrete examples and I'm not saying I'm dissatisfied with the answers I think I pretty much this is what I expected but just saying all that that is how a lot of the talking will be perceived yeah even if you don't intend it to be perceived that way but just just a reality check what could we do or have done to exceed those expectations so I can put that on my radar yeah I I think the big thing that people will be looking for is beyond uh motherboards and CPUs will be looked at more extensively I I think there almost has to be like a concrete really well-defined really low word count list of here are the changes we've made uh process-wise or otherwise so either process internally or process externally customer facing um and not like a multi- paragraph PR statement that's mostly words do you know what I mean like I'm hearing it and I understand the pr statements because I I that's what I receive every day um so I get it and I get it from your perspective uh but as the person who sits between viewers and companies I interface with I know how they're going to perceive it already uh and it's I think the answers have the right words in them sometimes a little bit long-winded a little bit repetitious but um I I haven't heard a ton of sort of concrete uh and maybe that goes back to the SEC stuff I don't know I'm not the only the conrete one that you're speaking of is the the open box waving any requirements for no no questions asked basically we're going to accept the returns that's the one concrete example that you're referring to correct that's sort of what I've heard so far is motherboard motherboards and CPUs looking for that list of other items yeah so so ideally going beyond the specific going Beyond a knee-jerk reaction to the motherboard that I had and saying maybe this is a a microcosm for a much larger issue how do we address the larger issue and not just Steve right like so I think I think that's great appr that's definitely going to be a take away and to be clear like for us I'm very grateful you all have spent the time and have sat down and explain things uh I I I have a little bit different perspective I think than a lot of the audience on what to expect going into these things so I would say this basically meets expectations um I I understand that after the camera stops rolling Maybe not immediately but you all and whoever else at new ex and management will start talking about this issue and hopefully it won't just be talk you know there will be change what I where I think the disconnect is once this camera turns off that's the end of what the viewers understand for the most part of this interaction other than viewers who are in similar positions right right and so there will have to be a followup really to to short sort of show hey they did actually make change well possibly before the video posts whenever that might be we can get back to that one which is opening up a special line of communication with us directly so even that you know again every customer every time matters to me personally and I believe we're able to execute that down to the the team members level so that we can engage with our customers and we'll have a specialized group that's handling this and then one at a time these customers could follow up and let the rest of the people know that hey we are taking care of business right yeah right well yeah I mean definitely stay in touch if you all don't mind um we will be doing follow-ups obviously um and uh hopefully you know maybe in a couple months or something if you feel there's been an improve Movement we could do another visit or something maybe walk through the RMA line I don't know um but uh definitely as as there are hard changes where you're updating policy or maybe you can speak a little bit to hey internally we've changed XYZ like we can't give you specifics but here's the idea right email that to me if you can sure um absolutely cuz I do want to do follow-ups and even if it's just a short thing in a news video where I know these things take time with massive comp companies uh and if in 2 weeks maybe you have the beginnings of some kind of change please send it to me so I can report on it yeah and and Stephanie for General customer service issues reports directly to me as well she has a manager but both of them report right into me so you've got a direct line of contact and we can exchange I'd actually rather you communicate with me if possible because all round up these folks other folks I mean that's I hustle around the building getting answers for that's what I'll do so absolutely but yeah we would welcome another visit we hope that we hear from customers and your audience how we've improved and we both hear about it you hear about it and ideally we have another meeting in the future where we can go through those right and and for now um for everybody in the audience who's in this binder and and the other three quarters I didn't print because the hotel got mad at me um I it sounds like for now the answer is if you're in this group of people who's had sort of an RMA issue or whatever return issue try again is that accurate we would I mean if you can leave that information with us so we can reach out to these customers we would want that yeah absolutely I can't leave this because there's some who requested not to be listed correct corre them us for the ones we would want to be yeah I'll filter for people who are okay with it and then yes that is accurate and if you'd like to leave us anything if possible great but yes we'd have that open invitation if there's something that's unresolved please don't hesitate to give us a give us a call and if you're not met with that immediate satisfaction level get that supervisor on the phone okay great sounds good awesome thank you Steve appreciate thanks guys thank you guys okay all right thanks all right now as for how things went ultimately uh we have a lot of thoughts on this both good and bad for the outcome of the interview the meeting and how things went first of all primer this was the most nervous I've ever been going into an interview and given the tension which was uh palpable in the room I suspect that the executives were also fairly nervous or at least most of them were so there's a few reasons for this on my end I was taking the issue extremely seriously and I take my job extremely seriously and I wanted to make sure that going into it I was not uh unfairly harsh towards new but also not too soft I didn't want to let new just get away with spewing PR statements for however long the interview was and then Clos in and we really kind of have no answers so there was a lot of pressure I felt uh to perform well for the audience for viewers and to do overall a service for everyone on new Ex side obviously they're answering for something that was an extreme error uh was questionable on sort of the the nature or the intent of that error and also to be fair I have a lot of camera experience and none of those Executives as far as I could tell do so that plays into it as well so everyone had pretty high nerves going into it now once it started flowing it felt like we were having a real conversation and as it should the camera melted away so that's the upside now the downside is for the first few minutes I felt like there was a lot of PR rambling there were a lot of really well chosen words that didn't particularly mean a whole lot in reality in the concrete world and as I said at the end of the interview to the executives directly and frankly after a little bit of hesitation there uh my feeling was that honestly it was like I could see the problem in front of me and as expressed to them it was it feels like this is a group of Executives high up in the company who make policies that are well written and sound good but there's a disconnect from perhaps reality where and you see this with a lot of large companies uh either they're not close enough to the ground floor or they're too close the politics and the money and the finance where they're not connecting anymore and there's that loss of becoming out of touch with reality or out of touch with the customer and instead focusing on internal matters and on investor relations and on the stock market and all this stuff what moves the market uh so that was perhaps part of the issue I I do feel like some of the team there might have started waking up to that um now another side of things is uh Terry Cox who seems like the right person for this particular situation given he's in customer service he's only been there for something like six months um the director of PR has only been there one month and that showed not in an insulting way but in a he doesn't have a lot of company history here way and so maybe that plays into it too so during the interview we were disappointed with how things were going initially after the interview it was very clear no one was quite sure how it went uh we the the room kind of politely exited everyone asked each other how we thought it went I mostly said well I think it went about as I expected um and that was kind of the end of it I asked Andrew later after we had left uh Andrew you all wouldn't know this since he's uh more behind the camera but Andrew has really key and sharp insights at specific times that uh some of the others of us like I don't have at times on the team and so I asked Andrew how do you think it went and being a person who only had to observe and his entire job was observing for this whole thing Andrew sharply said it felt like they were more worried about getting in more trouble or getting in trouble than they were about the customer and when he said that I agreed now here's where it gets better so there's a positive here too the positive is that new did enact some immediate changes after the interview so one of them was new opened the account we requested which it said it had already discussed to be fair to it but I hadn't done anything obviously n open an account specifically for returns and that account is returns. isue new.com uh where people who feel they have been wrongly rejected of an RM may may now try again even if it's outside of the window so that's awesome now as great as that is perhaps part of the problem here for newag just analyzing it in a way that's designed to hopefully help them and other companies is that a a a room full of Executives could not commit on camera in an instant to open a simple mailbox that's not hard to do uh it doesn't it's only good for the customer it does the right thing and from the business's point of view this will generate more money for the business if it does the right thing for the customer that's normally how it works there's obviously a line you draw but they drew the line far too close to New and not close enough to the people who pay it so the fact that the email address there couldn't be a commitment that simple in the interview and I maybe I should have pushed a little harder at this point when we were talking um to me is an indication of the greater problem which is that the VP of customer service the other VPS and directors uh still feel like they need to have meetings over opening an email address which says there are too many meetings happening and not enough action happening but uh it did get done so that's great the next thing newag did was it expanded its open box and RMA returns policy to include all items not just motherboards and CPS with Ben pins because you frankly you look at it and you're like why why just those two kind of cop out as that it's like trying to uh again it felt like trying to address Steve on YouTube and not address customers it doesn't really matter the issue I had it matters the overall issue so they expanded that that's good uh and none of that really meant anything to us until we started getting some emails we've gotten a couple emails from you all at this point where you've stated to us after emailing us about being wrongly denied an RMA or a refund previously having now gotten it after new EG went back through re-evaluated it and approved it so so hopefully this isn't just for show we can't judge new EG on what will happen in the next few months until that stuff happens for now all we can say is this newag appears to be at least saying it's taking the right steps that's not meant to sound cynical it's to be fair to the situation to respect the situation which is that nck has to take repeat action continuously to earn back the respect or the trust rather of its customers now next new has been doing this a long time as far as we can tell and we've had as stated hundreds of emails in just 36 hours when he opened that inbox without letting anyone know other than via text posts that it was open we had hundreds of emails about people who've run into similar problems to us and we vetted them we asked for proof it was attached we have lots of chat logs we have uh order IDs R tickets photos of damage or missing items or whatever and it's insane some of the stories that you all had so if Newegg continues to do what it stated and goes back through this huge backlog of people who maybe deserve a refund and were wrongly rejected of one effectively robbed our evaluation of this obviously then that's a step in the right direction it just needs to not keep happening in the future so that's some of the positive experiences the good things that are coming out of this but back on the negative side there's one really consistent Behavior here that's not a good behavior which we saw all throughout up until perhaps just after the interview maybe n had a little more respect for us after we met in person but uh what we experienced as Andrew pointed out very adeptly is that Newegg when we were a customer it rejected the r it received the motherboard back evaluated it claimed customer damage we pushed back Newegg allegedly re-evaluated it allegedly took photos of the board that we never received and claimed customer damage new sent the board back and the money back after we publicly complained and said uh hey by the way we're from this little YouTube channel we got it all back we look at it the RMA sticker is on there it's very clear that this is uh describable as nothing else else other than either a massive up or militias and here's where the behavior starts new saw an issue brought to public light when it was Private when we tried to resolve it privately we did not get resolution nck attempts to resolve the issue privately after it's been brought to public with high-profile person uh n then invites us to talk n then tries to stifle the option to use a camera and audio but then once we brought to light that new EG was originally going to accept the interview it went back to allowing camera and audio so those behaviors are all consistent with not really reacting until there's uh a a public push that's potentially a bad thing so and the same goes for ufd Tech issue where ufd Tech in his video talked about how he didn't get paid and suddenly after publicly mentioning it despite pushing internally for quite some time before that he finally got paid for the advertisements new ran with him all of these things are the same type of behavior so hopefully and also by the way so is the statement of hopefully you don't publish that email or whatever it was at the beginning of the when we met them outside so what we need to see is we need to see that go away obviously and we also need to see new be consistent with its new policies and new actions and make sure customers are treated uh in a fair way and not just treated as Liars uh and ripped off so that's where it ends really we are very curious what you all think this is long but we're trying to be as transparent as possible the whole situation so um where we stand very condensed right now is overall during the interview we felt New Egg performed subpar uh met expectations but those weren't high and after the interview we feel newag has taken very quick action um now it's just a matter of will it address enough people and get out to all the customers who need that help who've been rejected in the past uh and that's where we need you to come in and email us at egg Gamers nexus.net if you have new egg reach out to you or if you don't both are very important and let us know what happens and we'll also be following up with newc so in few months and a year new 's not going to know we have ways of getting in there and evaluating without Newegg knowing it's us so we will be continually evaluating making sure it's improving and it's not all just for camera at this time we we don't necessarily think it is just for camera but we can't prove that it isn't because it's too soon so hopefully that gives you a uh enough information to make a judgment on your own now and leave it to us and your peers who are buying from New Egg potentially to figure out if it's resolved thanks for watching thank you for supporting us during all of this you can go to store. Camas access.net to help us out directly please tweet at us and at Newegg with your thoughts on the interview and subscribe for more like this we have a lot of cool content coming up including some really detailed testing we'll see you all next timethis journey it wasn't easy all right they're waiting for us outside there's security the road to actually sit down with new Executives and discuss the issues was difficult and we felt like new was playing games with us up until the last possible second so you can film ignore my email and hopefully that won't be public uh you can film all you want outside this is Terry Cox and you can film pleas to meet you so you can film all you want outside and then no filming except for our conference room so no filming as you walk okay is that we'll keep it pointed at the floor while we walk in okay no I want a record of everything for for your guys s too I'll explain why after our first video of its questionable RMA practices n invited a conversation via phone and when we took newag up on it by alerting it in advance of showing up at its headquarters that we would like to talk the company agreed to the meeting and knew our plan was to film it fully transparently for our audience we landed in California with the meeting on the calendar having flown across the country and we shot the next video praising new egg and saying that we looked forward to the meeting because we wanted to help new EG to provide some competition in the market not just go in there and Flame it for an obvious mistake that we had already talked about a lot but after filming our previous video and before publishing it we received another email from Newegg with a very different tone it told us now that filming and audio would not be allowed on its property there are weasel words here we could have employed like okay we can go across the street but this looked as if newag was trying to test us at the last minute or if we give them the benefit of the doubt it was acting in fear we genuinely wanted to have a real conversation with newag to try and give the company a chance to answer for itself and improve itself this Epic Journey was brought to you by us and the GN store at store. Camas nexus.net our Fierce Independence is made possible by your purchases of our fully custom highquality products like our HUD black and red desk-sized mouse mats these Mouse mats have custom vibrant red anti-fray stitching at the borders Red Rubber Underside and highresolution print also check out our 3D component drink coasters with exceptionally unique details and highquality rubbers support your drinks while showing off this awesome hobby our large PC Building modm mats are back in stock now and shipping as well and they're the market leader in rugged work surfaces for computer and tear down projects for extreme heat resistance durability and utility with things like internet wiring diagrams cable pinouts and screw tracking GDs our toolkits are also in stock and shipping Now useful for GPU tear Downs or PC Building you can visit store. Gamers access.net to help us fund our future projects like this one and our test equipment while getting something quality in return our sincerest thanks to everyone who has supported us in any way for those of you who have Micro Center or some other alternative to newag and Amazon that's great but a lot of people including us really don't and we don't want Amazon to just become a monopoly and that's why after going back and forth on whether we should even publish that previous video we ultimately decided to publish it and hold Newegg to its promise since that's what we filmed the video under the premise of even though the promise had changed now after publishing that video presumably because we expressed General positivity and uh excitement to engage with new and potentially see an improvement and probably also because of the community response in the comments that was positive towards the acceptance of the upcoming meeting newag without telling us went back on its going back on its promise and decided it would meet with us after all on camera with audio so to recap how we got here before we proceed newag invited a phone conversation we took it further and we notified them that we'd be flying out instead with cameras newag accepted the meeting they then notified us no cameras would be allowed even though they already agreed to it they then went back on the going back of that and reneged the reeg which is maybe appropriate given the stock symbol of newag so important as we get into this as always there will be chapters in the description if you want to jump around but the biggest thing the reason this video is long yes we know but it's not longwinded is because we didn't want to make any cuts to the interview so going into this we wanted to make sure everything was represented as it happened in real life so neither party questions the outcome of the video newag has nothing to ask about why did you cut XYZ the audience doesn't have anything to ask about and we make sure everyone was represented fully transparently that was our objective that's why it was so important for us to bring the camera to the meeting because of just a closed doors meeting that doesn't really achieve the goal of bringing transparency to the issue of new 's return and customer service processes so in spite of how truly bad newag made itself look in the runup to all this we still wanted to be fair to them we gave newag the benefit of the doubt that maybe the company's panicking and acting in fear and so we sort of brushed that aside and decided to still go through at the meeting be direct be fair and not just flame it for something that we've already published multiple times now because our goal is giving Newegg a chance to improve itself it's really not fair to just attack without giving an opportunity to improve because then there's never any incentive for the subjects even get screwed up to improve this is maybe just a microcosm for the world in general so we wanted to extend that opportunity to new EG because it would just be better for all of you all our viewers and their customers if it can improve itself and do things the right way so we are including everything plus our own wrapup at the end that means you can watch the entire interview start to finish and make your own decision on what you think of Newegg statements and if it is improving or if it's making the changes that you want it to make additionally we will have our own recap at the end so you can jump to that one as well or you can jump around to the chapters for the key topics in the interview if you want to see what we think about the whole issue when we opened the email account egg Gamers nexus.net asking for well documented evidence of your own issues getting money back from New EG for selling you defective products or wrong products we received hundreds of emails in just 36 hours and we never even announced it in a video that was just with Twitter and YouTube Community posts which are far lower reach so that tells you something about the scope of the problem and that's why we're focused on The Wider issue for everybody in the community not just on our problem we didn't want to give Newegg the opportunity to say it's a one-off because it's clearly not but we do want to afford newag the opportunity to make things right and to make sure this doesn't happen again there've already been some policy changes coming out of this interview we tweeted about those recently we'll talk about them at the end of this video as well but for now let's get started here's the uncut interview with new's four high ranking employees okay just a quick anyway I guess since there's four of you guys if you don't mind just going around introducing just so everyone knows absolutely absolutely okay hey Steve again I'm Terry Cox I'm the vice president customer service here at Newegg uh in charge of all customer service operations um been with company about 6 months and one of the uh tasks I'm charged with doing is identifying issues like yours uncovering them digging down and seeing what we can do to provide a more positive experience to the customer and with that I'll hand it off to Don uh don gizak Vice President of Operations um I have both the transportation department as well as the Fulfillment group um the return center and Logistics falls under the Fulfillment group um been with new egg for three years my name is Eric W I'm director of public relations I've been with the company for one month um but I have two decades of experience in video game PR Tech PR um just to be upfront we're going to be 100% honest answer every question you have there's some questions we can't answer as a public company if we don't know the answer we're going to tell you we don't know the answer but I built a 25 year career on not lying we will not be l so pass it off to Vince cool nice to meet you guys um I'm Vince agular I am the director of platform experience um I just started this role recently um in this role uh I work with Business Leaders across the organization to uh focus on projects and different initiatives to improve our shopping experiences across our platforms such as our new.com website new business abs and so forth um I've been with the organization for 19 years going um this June um the first 18 and a half years uh I was dedicated to customer service and so I've kind of spent my entire career at New Egg here in customer service and now I get to serve um our business just with other um project related you know uh initiatives to help improve our platforms cool um so the let's see the first see the thought we had is just addressing your videos yeah just because that'll probably answer all your questions if we took you through what happened because what you what happened is is bad and we want to talk to you through all the steps and what went on because we've investigated it's we we're not we have nothing to defend it was a lot of errors were made and we want to explain to you what happened and that might help you understand and I'm I'm definitely fine with that um I'm my primary goal isn't to be here for my issue it's to be here for sort of The Wider issue of of similar things happening sure so I'm for sure open to hearing more about what happened specifically in that case but uh but we had a lot of people reach out to us in the last we opened an email account specifically for receiving these things and I mean some of the I can work with the people who emailed us as well and if you want to receive them directly I can maybe forward them at some point absolutely for the people who are willing to do that um but anyway the the main goal I think from my end was to make sure uh we talk about the wider issue and not just the specific motherboard if you want to talk about it start with that because I think it was really bad and you're a customer and we care about your customer experience so let's start that okay Eric thanks yeah for guiding that that direction okay yeah well what I'd like to say is um since the initial tweet that's the first time it came across my desk thanks for letting us know like wholeheartedly we we don't do the best job at times in your example of getting these the first time through obviously we can go back to the actual RMA issue itself and Don can speak more about that but once it was brought to one of our team members you blocked his name out but we know who it is and you know he he didn't didn't follow up right so you're contacting new he did some chats and essentially you're being told no we're not going to help you so what we're looking at doing is letting you know that that's not you know even one customer not with a huge followership but any customer that gets through and isn't taken care of the right way it's not okay for us so thanks for bringing it to our attention because of your followership it got to my desk right and we absolutely want to just take a minute and say we're sorry yeah I think the the big takeaway there too is it shouldn't have to get to your desk correct obviously so I don't know if there's I don't know the organization know well enough if there's sort of like a um a CMO type of person or whoever would kind of be at the top of the hierarchy but over customer service but ultimately it seems like there should be some sort of check where in the very least you you don't start with assuming the customer's lying I guess I don't know cuz I run a store too it's not as as high Revenue as New Egg yeah we don't ship as many things but we ship a pretty good amount of stuff and our general policy is to start with assuming an Earnest Customer because it almost never goes poorly right it's just like worst case you give someone fraudulent a free motherboard and I I don't think that will be exploited too often you know and uh and you put systems in in place to try and prevent it anyway yeah but just it it kind of I think and that's the this is actually one quarter of the emails that I received in the last 36 hours um most we vetted these most of these are related to the same type of thing where it's customers sort of assumed to be lying yeah or assumed to have caused the damage in the very least so I guess like I appreciate that uh that there was care once that got to your desk but also Newegg has too many customers for all of them to have to go to you no exactly and and so what I would say to that is identifying them quickly um and what I would like to say to your your you know followers and any potential customers of ours is anytime somebody doesn't get a five-star experience they need to speak to a manager or supervisor you know similarly to if I was in a restaurant and I my server wasn't taking care of me I'm going to ask for the manager now we would prefer to change the policies to where we're not assuming and we're you know quickly I can skip forward and say we we messed up you know it's several failure points in your case but as an example to others and uh any opportunity that we have to be made aware of that even on more of like a first line of defense from the customer service professional to their immediate supervisor or the corporate escalations team that you've been dealing with we want to resolve those issues quickly and learn from this mistake and admit it you know we definitely have some room to improve right um so I mean I guess the the first question I really wanted to ask is maybe it's an easy one I don't know it depends I guess but fairly straightforward which is you Amazon I said this in the other video uh is very well known for its return policy for customer relations shipping speed ease of access shipping price which their strategy is a whole separate topic but it's pretty amazing how they've made people expect that shipping cost 0 and that's hard for other retailers right so I guess the the question on sort of new side of things is ultimately with that as the competitor what is uh the the real reason or the core reason someone should buy from Newegg ABS absolutely and with Vince's experience I think he can speak well to the process improvements that we've been making prior to this uh your particular issue to improve the customer experience and that's kind of his Department Vince would you like to tackle that question yeah so thank you that's a good question um you know we're we've stayed firm in our commitment to deliver the best shopping experience we could offer our Shoppers you know over the years we've grown we've added new products we've offered different services and specifically over the last two years um with very instrumental feedback from our customers we've made some significant improvements and few of those things I can speak about um which are in 2020 um we've launched uh on our website our ability for our customers to get their third- party Marketplace orders uh returns online so being able to create those returns online previously they had to contact customer service so we really wanted to make it an easier shopping experience um within that same year we also updated one of our return policies which was the we added the zero zero dead pixel policy which that meant customers who purchased Monitor and television products um could return them uh 100% hassle-free with as little as one dead pixel so this was something that was a sticking point for our customers and you know we made it an we made an effort to change that policy because we want to make sure we're giv a great shopping experience um fast forward to 2021 we uh we launched our live chat bot so which this which this allowed our customers to get some really in uh immediate customer service um whether to track their package check their order status request a return report a delivery issue online 24 hours a day and if they need to speak with the human they have that ability to do so very quickly um we also launched our ability on the website for customers to report their delivery issues on the website because prior to that they had to contact customer service they needed to go through some more effort so we really focused on how to make our website a very easy shopping experience and then we also made some changes to one of our large item delivery uh uh policies where a c if a customer received a damaged product um they needed to report those damages within two business days we've updated that to match our our normal 14 business days so we have a consistent shopping experience for those customers that buy large item deliveries um and then lastly we proudly launched our Newegg uh 30-day hasslefree returns in 2021 which means that customers that buy products that are sold and shipped from new EG that carry that um hassle-free return badge can return their product with no restocking fees we cover the return shipping for products up to 50s um and you know these were some of the things that we just we learned from our customers our customers are so important to us and we really care about their shopping experience and you know we're looking at how others in the field are doing it and we want to make sure that we're competitive and we're delivering on that commitment so it sounds like the the policies are reasonably positioned are in the right place or come from the right place at least um based on just the what I've read through from viewers and what we've experienced then I don't think those policies are coming across to the customer so maybe that's the disconect so so with that you know we talk about the procedures and the standard operating procedures and the process in which we use to deliver on those commitments and to leverage those policies and that's where we saw that's where we saw the break right so so what is what is the SOP for like post purchase for dealing with the customer post purchase once you have their money once uh and they encounter an issue what's the step-by-step customer contacts new EG says I have X issue what happens internally before you answer the direct question I want to speak on a higher level too I think the sentiment that you're feeling is that might might be new might be other customers as well but it's the general feeling that ah you're wrong we're going to prove it to you and it could be viewed as some sort of deflection technique or there's pressures you come it's another thing from some of your videos and and others is where is that pressure coming from uh I think it's a general underlying pressure to be efficient you know we we ask our people to perform at certain levels and what we need to do is take care that we've got oversight and that one things we're speaking about um whatever the number is hundreds thousands whatever it is the sheer volume of of orders and the customers that are satisfied being careful not to minimize the impact that this has had on you and many other people out there uh aren't being represented and again I want to go back to even one customer is too many so if we've got policies in place and he can speak to those because he's been here for majority of his career what what can we do to enforce them and make sure we're not applying too much pressure for efficiency and the quality is being improved so I think that's the focus of where where can we get our team members and that's where I'm going to tell you we are going to mess up uh we have messed up one of the uh I think yeah and and this so a much more extreme example of we've messed up from a company yeah would be uh I hate to just like name them out of nowhere but uh I'll I'll anonymize it a little bit but there was a fire hazard issue there were multiple fire hazard issues but there was a fire hazard issue we covered last year and um that was a a great example of C uh customer runs into a very serious problem company messed up the company didn't resolve it properly but then you have fractal for example with the torrent case they also had a potential fire hazard issue and that's really Ser that's a lot more serious than sorry you got a motherboard with benett pins um but uh this is an instance where company messed up and then they got in front of it they recalled all the items they fixed the engineering they sent it out to press completely transparently so I think it's fine for a company to mess up and I I think our viewers understand that at this point um it's just about how is it dealt with right and on this end like the fact that I can get here is great but um this can't happen for hundreds or or many people at least hundreds in our audience no no that's a great example and I mean safety is Paramount to you know your health and livelihood I I think finances though are I don't want to say equally important but they're right up there the power of your purchase um if the company that you're purchasing from takes it seriously so some of these particular instances are where we need to change that view from our team members internally you know my team members are my customers my internal customers and if I'm going to take care of them and give them that right leadership and let them know that we care about them they can in turn share that empathy to to the customers calling in and so that's where one specific that we've done is we've gone back and looked at open box motherboards may have been a part of our press release we've gone back and looked at o open box motherboards and CPUs and Have Not only already begun contacting we've already gone through the last year a couple of them this year and maybe whoever it was I don't want to get the numbers I don't even know specifics but I have been confirmed that we've already issued refunds to any CPU or motherboard bent pin rejected on the on the return side so that's just one for for the open ones yeah that's one small step that we can do to make some reparations similar to the recalls but um yeah moving forward this has helped us adjust that policy so what is the SOP then for dealing with uh a customer who claims an issue like this absolutely so the the new standard operating procedure is to contact us either through the website like you had done or having to pick up once they're you know told well they won't be told that they're rejected so Don's team my team once the information comes in and it gets received we're going to look at that and automatically approve it there's no questions asked there and I think you know just going back to what you had said like so we've made positive policy changes I think your customer or your viewers are customers can see that right obviously you had a bad experience um so the policies are very competitive I think they're getting to where we need to be with the hassle fore return and all that um you know in this particular case other cases that have come come through you know there's the policy and then there's the procedure that needs to be followed in order for the policy to work so this is where we found the breakdown right um so in our return center we have redundancies along the way to that should be preventing these and I think it is preventing the vast majority of um issues that we have are open box or referb items kept in the same warehouse as new items they're kept in the same warehouse but they're kept in completely separate areas okay so if you see a warehouse like literally of 200,000 square feet um the new items are here and we keep the open box on the other side of the building completely separate completely different conveyor line so there's no possible way that a new item in an open box could be mistakenly picked okay I I have seen that happen in a few of these like few of the emails we've gotten so yeah one viewer bought um this was a couple years ago bought a 20 80 TI end up receiving a 680 TI open box item yeah I don't recall if if he said Newegg resolved the issue or not but the fact that it happened again is points to a process issue so and part of the process issue is or the part part of the process is um we have agents identifying right whether this is going to go back in as new to stock or if it's going to go back in as an open box to stock or if it's going to go damaged and go to ew do agents look at every item that comes back in when it's returned from a customer yes physical inspection like actually open the box and look at it right so we have two yeah so when we have um we have a receiving department on our um center right and as the as everything's unloaded from our carriers trailers or trucks we scan it verifying that we have the return um that we've received it right so then what it does is it goes through our Frontline agents okay and those Frontline agents are fed their returns through a conveyor system and what they do is they open the outside box obviously and they do a a manual inspection of has this been opened or is it brand new if it's brand new there's no damage to the Box they immediately accept the RMA and then they send back to New Stock if there's any exception any exception they don't have a they don't have rights to deny an RMA front line if there's any exception whether they see damage whether um the arm is incomplete which you know you run you know there's supposed to be three items only two got returned any exception goes to a second tier where another visual inspection um is done they try to figure out what the issue is and then at that point even the second tier in the RLC doesn't have rights to deny the RMA so at that point what they do is we submit a ticket basically going to customer service so that ticket when we do that we identify the reason code missing item wrong item missing accessory damaged right and they're doing the inspection on the spot there they submit a ticket and depending on the reason code they answer a set amount of questions you know most of them being yes and no um and then a lot of and then there's a section at the bottom does this need any additional comments anything else that customer service needs to know to make a decision and we have the ability to upload a picture if need be so at that point the ticket then goes to the customer service team he has a team that is investigating the different type of exceptions does the do the kpis fall on the Cs team ultimately for rejections um they do but what I'd like to to add to this is that right now we're talking about a process um it's not necessarily administrative or clerical it does require a certain level of decision- making to look a little bit deeper uh has this customer spent you know money with us are they a new customer you know what we do by that so is that already part of the process looking at the CER cust history it it's becoming a part of the process I was say that's the problem that's the number thing we one thing we do you know and I've got one guy who does shipping and one who does customer service right it's the first thing we do is if because not just of have they earned a status yeah but it's also it's one of the quickest gauges of right you know customers sometimes the story just it it's a little weird and you get this Vibe where you're like I don't know if they're lying maybe this person is lying to me but a really quick gauge of who cares if they're lying is they've spent thousands of dollars so it's not even about the amount of money is we have the ability to see how much they spent how if they have an account with us how long the account's been open how frequently they purchase um we have the ability to look at their return history to say you know they've returned something once a year we never had an issue with them but they've ordered 50 things and they returned one thing or hey in the last 30 days they've ordered 100 products and they've returned 99 of them we have the ability to see all that and that's part of the investigation that his team and his team do when they make these right yeah it sounds like some of the policies what I'm hearing so far is either the policies are good intentioned and poorly executed maybe in some cases or some of the policies like checking customer history are coming in really late to a company that's 20 years old plus yeah so that that's that's been in place okay um that has been in place you know I think so you're back to poor execution yeah let me give you an example we trying to elev poor execution right is in in most of these cases that's what it is and yours particular let's just go Um there was there was errors that happen with it going back to open box MH an era um now when it came back to us when I explained to you how we answer like the 10 questions right those are requ nine of the 10 questions are required right all the yes and knows that additional information that was would have been needed for yours is hey this had recently been sent back to a vendor it was it was damaged it has this sticker on it like we know it was we know so what happened is there was no additional in this particular case no additional information put in question 10 there was no picture uploaded right so when that ticket was submitted what it did is it went to his team right so his team looked at the the answers right and to them it was a standard case of we sent this out nothing was wrong with it and it came back with B pins everything checked off it was a standard case of we're suspecting that the customer did the damage yes yeah I guess two improvements there then are someone on on this secondary team maybe should go get the item and look at it yeah ideally you don't have multiple employees doing the same job for a lot of reason but reasons but um depending on the quantity I mean newegg's statement on Twitter claims that the occurrence of these issues the frequency of them is low and that it's a low maybe the percentage is low but um as an absolute number it starts to cause problems obviously online but if the occurrence of incident is low then I would think it would be justifiable to have someone in a position on on the Cs team to say hey maybe I should go pick this thing up because the customer insisting XYZ right yeah let me speak to that and and with regards to you know marketing public relations and our Twitter you know the the idea is that we're we're looking at this and I think adding that adjective of a low or small number Paints the wrong picture you know I'm here today uh and Don's here today to tell you as are all of us there's improvements that need to be made you know clearly and instead of minimizing the number you know even if it is a percentage of total volume which might appear low depending on that perspective these are real people right spending their hard earned money and that's in from a customer service perspective that's what I want to focus on each and every time can we get somebody to go grab those can we Elevate the execution when it's being rejected the customers that look for that purchase and they're fine great the ones that return and we approve the return relatively you know hassle-free and quickly like we should with hopefully very few exceptions excellent but what about the people in a similar case um where we're saying no we can't that's where we think we can Elevate the execution so that's where our focus is right now right yeah it it sounds like Pol I think what I'm hearing is at the executive or management level executive and management teams come up with or work with other team members to come up with these policies that have all the right language in them and and the right outlines for the start of the process and the end of it uh uh but then once it gets down to the team's handling the details of it the policies are being ignored and and I can add some context here where um we had a number of of Newegg employees and former New EG employees reach out to us with uh why they thought there were some issues in the process and um I think the main thing I was seeing was uh it's not that it's necessary there's one employee making all the mistakes it's that there's either too much pressure on things like kpis where the the pressure to meet certain targets is landing on the wrong individual maybe it should land higher up maybe maybe instead of hey these people are processing too many uh refunds or or creating too much loss maybe it's not their fault maybe it's the PM's fault or whoever's bringing the product in they need to establish with the manufacturer of the product hey this thing has high DOA or o you know a return rate can we get a a more generous policy from the manufacturer to allow New Egg to return it to the manufacturer instead of putting the pressure on the low level in 815 to18 an hour individual who's just going to go this isn't worth losing my job rejected let someone else deal with it yeah so let me answer the first question there so um so the changes that we're that we're talking about making from a procedural standpoint right um you know part of what what my Approach is and it's always been with the organization I've been with is it's always the bottom up I've spent multiple days you know since this whole thing has happened talking to the Associates on the floor that have act that actually do the job and looking at the system and how they're clicking things and saying hey how did this really happen like what would have prevented this is this just an honest mistake like I can tell you that um it is an honest it wasn't malicious we're not scamming you we're not scamming our other customers why would we do that right um we need you guys um so but how do we stop ourselves from making these honest mistakes honest errors and the the answer is not going to come from me um you know sitting in an office it's kind of come from the people that do it every day and say see if I just did this it would go into new instead of damage right you know what I mean how do we separate that process yeah and one of the notes we got said um noted that there were certain forms and procedures that the teams expected to follow that comes from management and then some of the the lower level teams may follow their own process or forms instead because they disagree with the ones from management yeah and now you have a mess right those have to have Toge maybe maybe theirs are better maybe yours are better but if no one's following the same process none of it there is no process yeah so um I mean if if I were to I like to go into meetings with an idea of of some kind of improvement even if I don't have any insight internally to what's going on but it sounds like there has to be a way for the people making the again the policy sounds good but there has to be a way for you guys and whoever else is on the executive team to talk with the people who are who are back there processing everything in a way where they don't feel threatened to offer suggestions right yeah and and that's and that is our process the policy is always going to come from management you know the business case we we do obviously it's open door policy um we're not a large we're not a huge company right um we know everybody by first name so um you know the policies are there but the procedures really are coming from the bottom up and who's the user who's the user we make sure everybody understands the policy and then we're going to the Frontline agents the supervisors maybe the manager and saying do we make sure that our procedures can meet this policy um even when everything aligns and everything is like Hey we're perfect there's there's still going to be errors there's still going to be errors someone still has a bad day you know someone gets distracted um that's still going to happen and to your point and why you're here right is when those errors happen or when right that how do we address how do we how do we make right I do think that just again based on my observ of the issue externally it seems like more than JN is having a bad day so he rejected the return um I I'm a little weary of throwing sort of one or two team members under the bus yeah and when I say a bad day I don't mean like he's maliciously doing it be like I had a you know he just made an era he's not maliciously doing it to to a certain degree Steve this is an open conversation we we'd like to and this is something I was it sounds like you might have something to add I would genuinely you know I'd love to hear what what would you based on what you're hearing know you're here go ahead I mean you're our customer we appreciate your feedback I think tell us what you think you know one thing I would like to I would really like to see is it's great that going forward there's supposed to be better uh especially open box or reer bares there's issues with new items too but yeah I'll keep it focused for now um you've mentioned ing out to some customers in the past uh about issues similar to the ones we were talking about where okay maybe we're going to look at their case again um I don't know do you have a timeline how far back you're looking for those so far we've gone through all of 2021 okay the results just came in yesterday they were 100% effective everybody we've reached out has replied back in a very short period of time 100% do you have a quantity how many people yeah I don't know are we supped we're not allowed to disclose that I think there's certain with you know public filings I'm not trying to hide behind certain but I I asked if I could offer that information was told to refrain from percentages or specifics but what I can say is that if you are watching this or if you know of you know an email and you haven't been contacted you know it might not have been an open box that's where our focus is right now but if you feel that there's something that we should be able to do for you the easiest way is to go to our website you know like anybody like you did talk to one of our team members customer service reps and if they're not able to assist you and they say oh this has already been handled ask for a supervisor yeah I'd like to make a suggest so as as a an unfortunate customer of spectrum and AT&T uh I've like many other people have The Misfortune of you you get worn down by going through the process over and over yeah and my suggestion and I I do think from from a PR standpoint this would look great if you do this is to open a specific inbox or a specific line I I do think an email would be the easiest everyone but a specific inbox uh for looking at these specific instances so either either past issues so you know you mentioned 2021 okay um but uh in case someone's fallen through the cracks AB you you have something targeted where they don't have to go through the normal chat lines they don't have to explain to the agent six times and get escalated and explain it uh yeah know it would be great and without making you a commitment right here I will you know it's already been disc discussed and we've got some people that are looking into the idea and seeing if we can make that happen and if so is there a chance we can get a commitment we cannot because we're a public company so we can't speculate in the future but we like your idea yeah so without committing what I'd like to say is that I'm working with the team members and advocating for some sort of specialized open you know something that we can tailor mate and custom um that can say hey if you're a new a customer you to email me a commitment before this video goes up sometime in the next few days I I'll I'll make it uh I'll make it a priority to get the answer yes or no we'll put it on the screen if you know if we get something yeah again we we because doing that or something similar or directing them through the proper channels would basically like you said for PR or whatever it would basically say look we really do have an open door policy we we want you to come to us I want any customer we feel that by delivering on a higher level of customer service we're going to get repeat customers if we're taking care of you you're going to want to come back and Shop with us and so it just makes sense is there is there a reason for only doing motherboards and the CPUs and the uh the new open box and referb policy in terms of what's what's taken back with low hassle or or no questions well yeah right now what we're doing is specifically with the bent pins issue or or the CPUs or motherboards but would we expand that we're also considering that we're wanting to find out as Vince was detailing how we can make it a more comprehensive customer experience it it seems like to me the simplest thing is if if you are if you're selling open box and reer items you're taking an inherent risk and you can either have a cumbersome amount of processes before the product goes back out the door to make sure it has everything or it's going to pass yeah right or you can make it cheaper and easier for newag and and also the customer and just say anything open box or refurb you have X many days maybe maybe it's 14 instead of 30 right where maybe part of buying open box is there's a there's a note says open box hey are policy is a little different we'll take it back you have a little bit fewer days mhm but we'll take it back um I that to me when when it's only motherboards and only CPUs it looks like a cop out I think to be honest like it's great that that's there but it is sort of like why not everything else okay okay I appreciate that feedback honestly it just seems like it would and ultimately I mean I have one really good example of a customer that I think this this should speak to management really more than anything where this particular customer had the short version is um the customer opened an RMA sent the item back uh on the grounds of the item being the incorrect items not what he ordered and the RMA was getting voided or cancelled for the reason of the RMA so in other words it came back the team says this isn't the right item in the box and then rejects it except that's the reason the Army was open exactly so they're stuck in a in a a i I can tell you me finish this the the big thing with this particular case though and some of the others we've looked at this user did eventually get their money back but they were in contact with Newegg for 7 weeks calling and messaging almost daily how much does that cost Newegg exactly to pay a customer service rep to sit there and deal with this guy every day for seven weeks at some point you've exceeded the value of the item oh no well far exceeded I don't know the specific cost right Vince Vince was just uh talking to me about this and Vince feel free to to chime in I think it was the first week I had joined the organization a similar story you know one of these horror stories where it was uh item received was not what I ordered and you know trying to return it it again it was very similar I had to jump on the phone I felt that to understand the customer perspective Vince can take you through how we're making improvements to prevent that from happening um what what do we how have we changed to allow the customers to like this to go from seven weeks to maybe a few days where it gets escalated to a team member we're making a decision and we're able to satisfy the customer needs yeah so um what I can say is that you know the team is going to go through the process of validating what that issue is right and so U my understanding is there's you know they we work with our warehouse teams to look at our inventory um we look we work with our pm M teams the purchasers to understand what was being advertised um and sometimes we have to go steps further to go and check with the manufacturer or even our distributor depending on what that may be um and we need to take those steps to validate what that might be and this could be a $2,500 gift uh VGA card it could be a high value product um but in terms of the time to follow up with the customer you know I think we all can agree that that is beyond way too long um we strive for our first Contact resolution we want our process to be well defined and and and work in a way that is going to deliver the results and and be timely with it because we value our customers time and certainly it doesn't make sense to drag it out this long but um there are processes in place to validate those um and and the one thing I also want to say you know some of the processes that we're talking about these are processes for products sold and shipped by Newegg that are forfill through our fulfillment centers and our return Logistics centers we also offer that Marketplace experience and the products that are sold and shipped by those sellers they have their own return process total different story all of these are sold and shipped by new okay got it um the the marketplace I I don't even want to get into but uh I I think you all are are aware of similar issues happening there I mean yeah to some extent you're taking a you're taking as a buyer you're taking a risk buying from someone who's effectively selling on a version of eBay you know um so I I don't even that's that would make this go too long so these are all sold and shipped by Newegg so you know I'm and I'm not sure I I think Vince were we're we're scratching at the surface but I think we need to dig deep so one thing that we need to do and that we're I don't I don't even know again this is an area where I think we need to say hey we need to make this a higher priority with this customer the example that I gave it was a customer who had bought a I don't I'm going to make this up right now I think it might have been like a 3070 but they got a 3090 GPU and he he said it it was what he was looking for for some other reason he wanted to return it and we said no that was the wrong item in the Box it was literally a more expensive item which didn't make sense yeah I I've seen a few like that too yeah yeah and so I got involved we looked at it and again it was declined because it didn't match up and it took somebody to make a decision to realize customer history other things that we should already be doing that we might not be so I think maybe maybe that that to me if when I'm dealing with any kind of management that to me would sound like maybe the process is it's either too rigid or there's a management or or higher level reason that the people on the ground don't care um and I say management or higher level because I I don't want it to be just like it's that guy's fault today but probably that comes from somewhere higher up ultimately a company hired the person they have the policies maybe the policy is too rigid where all they're looking at is name of item name of other item not the same rejected right and and there's no further thought because perhaps the kpis or or whatever they're judged on are too um high pressure to where they feel like they have to push them through as fast as they can and I if I were in that position if someone tells me you need to push through however many to get to clear this que today I'm going to look for the most efficient way to do that that I think has pretty high accuracy and in that scenario it's going to be I look at the sheet maybe I don't know even what the products are right but I see 3090 I see 3070 therefore not the same rejected right so maybe too much rigidity or too high pressure for performance uh something like that yeah yeah yeah I don't know that that would be I'm trying to look at it too from an employee level where even though the policy comes from the top and the work is is ground up um it it there's a reason that that uh teams of people will make what are perceived as mistakes and if it's coming at this frequency I don't think it's just one employee I think I think it's again either too much rigidity or no one's on the same page so I I guess if like if I were going to go through suggestions you know i' I'd love a commitment sounds like I won't get it but on opening an email inbox specifically for dealing with I don't rule it out yet give us give us a be all and I think we should also mention that we do have our Newegg service Twitter so that's one that our customers can absolutely right now it's active they can reach out to us um and if I'm seeing the action from our branding team our social team they're actually following up with a lot of customers who are leaving comments online um that's something we pride ourselves on doing which is keeping our ear to the internet and making sure that we're engaging with customers who are engaging With Us online right whether they're tweeting us at new EG or they're on other various social channels like we want to engage with those customers we care about their feedback we only improve based on the feedback from our customers and you know this is really important to us so I mean um ultimately when when you guys walk away from the meeting here what is it you think you're going to be talking about you know what out of all of this returns returns and and I don't know you know uh to what extent I can provide value ultimately because I'm sure a lot of these things have been discussed the team is large enough and experienced enough but um I guess what I'm getting after is there's certain commitments that can't be made because of laws that I don't understand because they're SEC laws that's fine I can't really challenge that right I don't know I don't know those laws but um I guess at least what are if you could truncate the list to these are the key things we want to go talk to our teams about what does that list look like sure I'll I'll yeah let me feel this one guys so it's it's ultimately we discussed it briefly but to make it a little bit more concise if a customer is going to contact customer service we're able to give them a favorable response right that Frontline team member should be empowered to go ahead and handle that it's a favorable response customers going to be happy if they're less than five star experience and we're working that into some of our scripting basically then we want to escalate that to a tier two or an actual supervisor that's our first line of defense if you contact us I heard the phone call originally you were the less than satisfied had to ask the gentleman when can I expect a call back you know things like that are indicators that hey I don't know it let me get somebody that can help you we want to let you walk out of the new egg store in the form of either a live chat or a phone without satisfying you know the if it makes sense or at least getting somebody that's a decision maker so um the escalation of uh negative issues is a key priority to us right now anytime we're going to have to tell a customer no sorry can't can't do this we want somebody with more decision-making skills and empowerment not the person being pushed by certain kpis how many calls can you take and whatever these kpis may you know be uh that that's that's the number one on the returns process side Don's doing similar and he can speak to that basically engaging with his team making sure that the Frontline supervisors are grabbing these more often whether it's pressure or you I'm not going to call anybody on our team you know unmotivated I don't think that's it but there's something that we need to unlock that so that's that's the first one um did you want to add to any of that yeah I just you know from an operation side I think the most important thing is you know everyone's seen your videos and everybody's you know a lot of our people follow you yeah um like I said you know we're not we're not a a company that has 500,000 employees right um we're a company that has you know couple thousand right so when they see a video about our return center and an error that was made in our return center you know this error is pointed like you said I know I like that you're keeping it higher because this is like an error or two errors or whatever it is it is like very definable to like one person and you know the people that we have they're committed they're passionate with what they do um and we don't want to point it to one person it's a process era that we made not one person made we made right I mean even that board went through three times so I don't know if it's the same people you know but yeah for sure at some point it's like come on guys get it together no we get it and I think the biggest take away you know from from you know this right especially this is our folks want to be involved in the solution they have the best ideas they know exactly what they did to click this versus click that or you know this restrains them from you know preventing it or stopping the flow of the package on the spot so they want to be involved um you know that's our commitment is to get them involved for sure because they'll have the best solution for us and we're grateful to you for exposing this error it was you know a gap in our process we Endeavor to be the best technology e-commerce company in the globe in the world and improve every day and it's a complex business and and we're going to make mistakes still but we Endeavor to be the best we want to win the the customers back that have become disenfranchised who have left us you've been a customer of ours for over a decade you spent quite a bit of money and we should have not had this process three different accounts too we yeah so your videos should not have been made because we should have never made those errors but and we should have probably released our statement earlier but we're here now we're glad to meet with you address it and make improvements but if it does happen again that's back to what can we do about it how how can we you know speed that up not to seven weeks not to have to go through multiple contacts and again don't don't rule out that we might put out a special email um but in the meantime you know we still have that 800 number if you do need to speak to a supervisor we just encourage everybody to do that right I personally know the names of all of the supervisors and their managers and customer service most of them have been to my house for barbecue or tacos so again we're these are my internal customers and if I'm going to expect them to give you and the rest of the customers good service we're taking care of them and we're going to find out how we can speed up these escalations process so if another person misses it well hey we got your back you know we're going to take care of you awesome and and just to add Steve you know you asked what are we going to do after this you know we're going to continue on our mission which is based on that commitment to delivering the best shopping experience you know as someone who started here taking phone calls you know early in my career um I've seen this company evolve um as being part of the customer service department um being part of the team who's handling these calls s working with our customers I've had the privilege to speak with really great customers who gave us really instrumental feedback to help us identify how we can get better um and that's that commitment we're going to continue moving forward um because as Don mentioned you know our employees are really critical to this operation our customers are and for new EG our customers and our employees are the most important parts of this brand so we will continue on that commitment well you know and with growing uh I won't mention any competitors names Steve but with Growing Pains uh customer service suffers even some of thep companies that are our direct competitors that used to be known for Stellar service and they're still building it's it's hard to chase some of these competitors with how quick and easily it is to do certain things but even their customer service metrics have have dipped some of the sentiment that I've been seeing as well is oh New Egg used to be well we we want them to know we want you to know that we've got people that are passionate we're genuinely interested I I'm sure that that's coming across but how well we execute will remain to be seen and the improvements um you know we we hope that you'll see a difference and we'll sure we're pretty sure we'll be hearing from you in yeah I I think the the sort of like on the closing side of things the only speaking completely frankly um I think the big thing for your teams or or this particular you you all to be aware of is uh there's a lot of action that has to be done there's a lot of talking we have done but I I would just be wary of I don't know to to be honest the way that I think viewers will perceive a lot of this is actions matter Executives high paid Executives maybe or directors or VPS um doing what directors VPS and PR do which is use a lot of really well chosen words without really concrete examples and I'm not saying I'm dissatisfied with the answers I think I pretty much this is what I expected but just saying all that that is how a lot of the talking will be perceived yeah even if you don't intend it to be perceived that way but just just a reality check what could we do or have done to exceed those expectations so I can put that on my radar yeah I I think the big thing that people will be looking for is beyond uh motherboards and CPUs will be looked at more extensively I I think there almost has to be like a concrete really well-defined really low word count list of here are the changes we've made uh process-wise or otherwise so either process internally or process externally customer facing um and not like a multi- paragraph PR statement that's mostly words do you know what I mean like I'm hearing it and I understand the pr statements because I I that's what I receive every day um so I get it and I get it from your perspective uh but as the person who sits between viewers and companies I interface with I know how they're going to perceive it already uh and it's I think the answers have the right words in them sometimes a little bit long-winded a little bit repetitious but um I I haven't heard a ton of sort of concrete uh and maybe that goes back to the SEC stuff I don't know I'm not the only the conrete one that you're speaking of is the the open box waving any requirements for no no questions asked basically we're going to accept the returns that's the one concrete example that you're referring to correct that's sort of what I've heard so far is motherboard motherboards and CPUs looking for that list of other items yeah so so ideally going beyond the specific going Beyond a knee-jerk reaction to the motherboard that I had and saying maybe this is a a microcosm for a much larger issue how do we address the larger issue and not just Steve right like so I think I think that's great appr that's definitely going to be a take away and to be clear like for us I'm very grateful you all have spent the time and have sat down and explain things uh I I I have a little bit different perspective I think than a lot of the audience on what to expect going into these things so I would say this basically meets expectations um I I understand that after the camera stops rolling Maybe not immediately but you all and whoever else at new ex and management will start talking about this issue and hopefully it won't just be talk you know there will be change what I where I think the disconnect is once this camera turns off that's the end of what the viewers understand for the most part of this interaction other than viewers who are in similar positions right right and so there will have to be a followup really to to short sort of show hey they did actually make change well possibly before the video posts whenever that might be we can get back to that one which is opening up a special line of communication with us directly so even that you know again every customer every time matters to me personally and I believe we're able to execute that down to the the team members level so that we can engage with our customers and we'll have a specialized group that's handling this and then one at a time these customers could follow up and let the rest of the people know that hey we are taking care of business right yeah right well yeah I mean definitely stay in touch if you all don't mind um we will be doing follow-ups obviously um and uh hopefully you know maybe in a couple months or something if you feel there's been an improve Movement we could do another visit or something maybe walk through the RMA line I don't know um but uh definitely as as there are hard changes where you're updating policy or maybe you can speak a little bit to hey internally we've changed XYZ like we can't give you specifics but here's the idea right email that to me if you can sure um absolutely cuz I do want to do follow-ups and even if it's just a short thing in a news video where I know these things take time with massive comp companies uh and if in 2 weeks maybe you have the beginnings of some kind of change please send it to me so I can report on it yeah and and Stephanie for General customer service issues reports directly to me as well she has a manager but both of them report right into me so you've got a direct line of contact and we can exchange I'd actually rather you communicate with me if possible because all round up these folks other folks I mean that's I hustle around the building getting answers for that's what I'll do so absolutely but yeah we would welcome another visit we hope that we hear from customers and your audience how we've improved and we both hear about it you hear about it and ideally we have another meeting in the future where we can go through those right and and for now um for everybody in the audience who's in this binder and and the other three quarters I didn't print because the hotel got mad at me um I it sounds like for now the answer is if you're in this group of people who's had sort of an RMA issue or whatever return issue try again is that accurate we would I mean if you can leave that information with us so we can reach out to these customers we would want that yeah absolutely I can't leave this because there's some who requested not to be listed correct corre them us for the ones we would want to be yeah I'll filter for people who are okay with it and then yes that is accurate and if you'd like to leave us anything if possible great but yes we'd have that open invitation if there's something that's unresolved please don't hesitate to give us a give us a call and if you're not met with that immediate satisfaction level get that supervisor on the phone okay great sounds good awesome thank you Steve appreciate thanks guys thank you guys okay all right thanks all right now as for how things went ultimately uh we have a lot of thoughts on this both good and bad for the outcome of the interview the meeting and how things went first of all primer this was the most nervous I've ever been going into an interview and given the tension which was uh palpable in the room I suspect that the executives were also fairly nervous or at least most of them were so there's a few reasons for this on my end I was taking the issue extremely seriously and I take my job extremely seriously and I wanted to make sure that going into it I was not uh unfairly harsh towards new but also not too soft I didn't want to let new just get away with spewing PR statements for however long the interview was and then Clos in and we really kind of have no answers so there was a lot of pressure I felt uh to perform well for the audience for viewers and to do overall a service for everyone on new Ex side obviously they're answering for something that was an extreme error uh was questionable on sort of the the nature or the intent of that error and also to be fair I have a lot of camera experience and none of those Executives as far as I could tell do so that plays into it as well so everyone had pretty high nerves going into it now once it started flowing it felt like we were having a real conversation and as it should the camera melted away so that's the upside now the downside is for the first few minutes I felt like there was a lot of PR rambling there were a lot of really well chosen words that didn't particularly mean a whole lot in reality in the concrete world and as I said at the end of the interview to the executives directly and frankly after a little bit of hesitation there uh my feeling was that honestly it was like I could see the problem in front of me and as expressed to them it was it feels like this is a group of Executives high up in the company who make policies that are well written and sound good but there's a disconnect from perhaps reality where and you see this with a lot of large companies uh either they're not close enough to the ground floor or they're too close the politics and the money and the finance where they're not connecting anymore and there's that loss of becoming out of touch with reality or out of touch with the customer and instead focusing on internal matters and on investor relations and on the stock market and all this stuff what moves the market uh so that was perhaps part of the issue I I do feel like some of the team there might have started waking up to that um now another side of things is uh Terry Cox who seems like the right person for this particular situation given he's in customer service he's only been there for something like six months um the director of PR has only been there one month and that showed not in an insulting way but in a he doesn't have a lot of company history here way and so maybe that plays into it too so during the interview we were disappointed with how things were going initially after the interview it was very clear no one was quite sure how it went uh we the the room kind of politely exited everyone asked each other how we thought it went I mostly said well I think it went about as I expected um and that was kind of the end of it I asked Andrew later after we had left uh Andrew you all wouldn't know this since he's uh more behind the camera but Andrew has really key and sharp insights at specific times that uh some of the others of us like I don't have at times on the team and so I asked Andrew how do you think it went and being a person who only had to observe and his entire job was observing for this whole thing Andrew sharply said it felt like they were more worried about getting in more trouble or getting in trouble than they were about the customer and when he said that I agreed now here's where it gets better so there's a positive here too the positive is that new did enact some immediate changes after the interview so one of them was new opened the account we requested which it said it had already discussed to be fair to it but I hadn't done anything obviously n open an account specifically for returns and that account is returns. isue new.com uh where people who feel they have been wrongly rejected of an RM may may now try again even if it's outside of the window so that's awesome now as great as that is perhaps part of the problem here for newag just analyzing it in a way that's designed to hopefully help them and other companies is that a a a room full of Executives could not commit on camera in an instant to open a simple mailbox that's not hard to do uh it doesn't it's only good for the customer it does the right thing and from the business's point of view this will generate more money for the business if it does the right thing for the customer that's normally how it works there's obviously a line you draw but they drew the line far too close to New and not close enough to the people who pay it so the fact that the email address there couldn't be a commitment that simple in the interview and I maybe I should have pushed a little harder at this point when we were talking um to me is an indication of the greater problem which is that the VP of customer service the other VPS and directors uh still feel like they need to have meetings over opening an email address which says there are too many meetings happening and not enough action happening but uh it did get done so that's great the next thing newag did was it expanded its open box and RMA returns policy to include all items not just motherboards and CPS with Ben pins because you frankly you look at it and you're like why why just those two kind of cop out as that it's like trying to uh again it felt like trying to address Steve on YouTube and not address customers it doesn't really matter the issue I had it matters the overall issue so they expanded that that's good uh and none of that really meant anything to us until we started getting some emails we've gotten a couple emails from you all at this point where you've stated to us after emailing us about being wrongly denied an RMA or a refund previously having now gotten it after new EG went back through re-evaluated it and approved it so so hopefully this isn't just for show we can't judge new EG on what will happen in the next few months until that stuff happens for now all we can say is this newag appears to be at least saying it's taking the right steps that's not meant to sound cynical it's to be fair to the situation to respect the situation which is that nck has to take repeat action continuously to earn back the respect or the trust rather of its customers now next new has been doing this a long time as far as we can tell and we've had as stated hundreds of emails in just 36 hours when he opened that inbox without letting anyone know other than via text posts that it was open we had hundreds of emails about people who've run into similar problems to us and we vetted them we asked for proof it was attached we have lots of chat logs we have uh order IDs R tickets photos of damage or missing items or whatever and it's insane some of the stories that you all had so if Newegg continues to do what it stated and goes back through this huge backlog of people who maybe deserve a refund and were wrongly rejected of one effectively robbed our evaluation of this obviously then that's a step in the right direction it just needs to not keep happening in the future so that's some of the positive experiences the good things that are coming out of this but back on the negative side there's one really consistent Behavior here that's not a good behavior which we saw all throughout up until perhaps just after the interview maybe n had a little more respect for us after we met in person but uh what we experienced as Andrew pointed out very adeptly is that Newegg when we were a customer it rejected the r it received the motherboard back evaluated it claimed customer damage we pushed back Newegg allegedly re-evaluated it allegedly took photos of the board that we never received and claimed customer damage new sent the board back and the money back after we publicly complained and said uh hey by the way we're from this little YouTube channel we got it all back we look at it the RMA sticker is on there it's very clear that this is uh describable as nothing else else other than either a massive up or militias and here's where the behavior starts new saw an issue brought to public light when it was Private when we tried to resolve it privately we did not get resolution nck attempts to resolve the issue privately after it's been brought to public with high-profile person uh n then invites us to talk n then tries to stifle the option to use a camera and audio but then once we brought to light that new EG was originally going to accept the interview it went back to allowing camera and audio so those behaviors are all consistent with not really reacting until there's uh a a public push that's potentially a bad thing so and the same goes for ufd Tech issue where ufd Tech in his video talked about how he didn't get paid and suddenly after publicly mentioning it despite pushing internally for quite some time before that he finally got paid for the advertisements new ran with him all of these things are the same type of behavior so hopefully and also by the way so is the statement of hopefully you don't publish that email or whatever it was at the beginning of the when we met them outside so what we need to see is we need to see that go away obviously and we also need to see new be consistent with its new policies and new actions and make sure customers are treated uh in a fair way and not just treated as Liars uh and ripped off so that's where it ends really we are very curious what you all think this is long but we're trying to be as transparent as possible the whole situation so um where we stand very condensed right now is overall during the interview we felt New Egg performed subpar uh met expectations but those weren't high and after the interview we feel newag has taken very quick action um now it's just a matter of will it address enough people and get out to all the customers who need that help who've been rejected in the past uh and that's where we need you to come in and email us at egg Gamers nexus.net if you have new egg reach out to you or if you don't both are very important and let us know what happens and we'll also be following up with newc so in few months and a year new 's not going to know we have ways of getting in there and evaluating without Newegg knowing it's us so we will be continually evaluating making sure it's improving and it's not all just for camera at this time we we don't necessarily think it is just for camera but we can't prove that it isn't because it's too soon so hopefully that gives you a uh enough information to make a judgment on your own now and leave it to us and your peers who are buying from New Egg potentially to figure out if it's resolved thanks for watching thank you for supporting us during all of this you can go to store. Camas access.net to help us out directly please tweet at us and at Newegg with your thoughts on the interview and subscribe for more like this we have a lot of cool content coming up including some really detailed testing we'll see you all next time\n"