Full marks to Elgato customer service

I spend a lot of time on this blog writing about poor customer service, but it’s important for me to highlight where it’s blindingly good.

The whole thing about any kind of customer support is that the base level expectation is for it to be good. You’ll only really get complemented if it’s truly exceptional. On the other hand, anything even slightly less than good will garner complaints (and rightly so).

And, Elgato (part of Corsair) deserve praise.

I’m a happy customer of their Stream Deck products – these are devices which connect to your computer and have a number of buttons on them, each with a programmable screen behind them, which you can change what the buttons do. As the name suggest, it’s aimed at streamers, but actually these can be used just as effectively for general productivity, which is my own use-case.

Anyway, one of their Stream Deck products is a large plastic pedal that goes on the floor, connected via USB-C, and consists of 3 areas that you press with your foot. Like the desktop Stream Deck, it can be programmed to do different things and, indeed, all of the Stream Deck products can be modified via the same software in the same way (albeit the pedal doesn’t have any screens).

I’ll admit to not utilising it as much as the main product but there’s equally something very satisfying in being able to end a video call by stamping your foot on the pedal (which is one of the uses I have it set up for).

I bought the pedal in February of 2022 and it comes with a 2 year warranty. But, a few weeks ago, it stopped working. There was no power and the software showed that the device wasn’t connected, even when I tried changing the USB cable.

So, I contacted Elgato to see if they could suggest anything.

They talked it through with me, via email, and confirmed that the product was outside of warranty (by 19 months). And, yet, suddenly, they started an RMA to replace it. I didn’t ask for it: they just did it. Free postage for my old one back to them, and for a new one out to me.

Sometimes they might make decisions like this based on your standing as a customer, yet they’re only aware of me buying this and my Stream Deck+. They don’t know about the low-profile microphone arm that I also have, along with the Stream Deck I bought before upgrading to the Plus model (both of those were not bought directly from them). So I’m more of a customer than they realise and, needless to say, will continue to be so!

It took a few weeks as is was all shipping via The Netherlands but, yesterday, it turned up. A brand new, sealed, product. And it works beautifully.

It feels churlish to bring up any issues all things considered but there’s always room for improvement in any process and I have fed back to Elgato, not only the excellent service here, but something that could be improved. Their RMA process bombarded me with multiple emails on how to return the product, with lots of attachments and confusing instructions. In the end, I ended up driving to a local UPS office and speaking to someone there to help me out. UPS, equally, were excellent here and sorted everything out for me.

In my case, I didn’t deserve a free RMA as I was well outside of warranty, but they’ll be using the same process for those that do, and if they can improve that for future use, that’s always going to be positive.