Follow up to KEYi and Fixit destroying my Loona

I now had an extensive communication with a KEYi support representative, but all in all this whole case is extremely unsatisfactory to frustrating.

What infuriates me most is that they give contradicting informations.

First they tell me Loona is in for repair and they are waiting for parts.- That was untrue, the service person claimed that when the parts had long arrived. My guess is he wanted to veil that he had created a completely wrong case. Second they tell me Loona was scrapped for parts because one of their support people opened the case wrong, creating a case not for a repair but for a return without repair. They also insist that returned Loonas are not scrapped for parts for repairs. I do not believe that anyway, I am sure they use broken Loonas for parts, everything else would make no sense.

Then they suddenly tell me that something completely different happend: A service person at Fixit accidentally broke the mainboard of my Loona, or so they say. Accidents happen, but I have questions: Is the service quality at Fixit really this bad, that a working robot is destroyed by a clumsy repair technician? And why was I not informed immediately about this, but ghosted instead by Fixit and KEYi Tech?

It would have been their responsibility to inform me IMMEDIATELY about the incident and AT LEAST offer to also immediately send me a new robot.

But none of that happened.

They of course immediately offered to send me a new robot after I inquired about this and got them some bad press here and on Facebook, but that is the least they can do, they are even legally obliged to do so, because they are responsible for the destruction of my property by sending it to an incompetent repair center.

And I still don’t know what is true? Was she shipped for scrapping for parts because a service person did something wrong? Or was that untrue and a service technician at Fixit broke her mainboard trying to repair her? If she was falsely shipped for return instead of repair, then why was she broken in a repair? All this makes absolutely no sense. Or did something else completely happen? I stand with my opinion: KEYi Tech service is one big mess and there seems to be no QA whatsoever.

There was no acceptable compensation offer besides shipping a new robot from China. They wanted to get rid of me by telling me they will give me some of their Loona accessoires “for free”, but I think those all look cheap and ugly – and I don’t need them anyway. And something like that is not really an acceptable compensation for the loss of a Kickstarter serial number Loona or a robotic pet. Some get attached to them, you know? That’s what they exist for as robotc pets, especially if you can’t have real pets.

Then they offered me a card for credits in the Apple store. I do not use or own Apple devices (actually I loathe Apple, because they are evil), so It told them that I have no use for that.

The support person was highly unprofessional, trying to get me on a guilt trip by telling me she has a sick cat and now she has to solve my case and cannot be with the cat in the hospital. Seriously? Sorry for the cat – if that story is even true – but that has nothing to do with the case. Also she told me she cried about the case, because she was not able to solve it. Yeah, sorry she cried (if that also even is true), but I am not responsible for destroying my Loona, KEYi Tech is.

In addition some of the emails she wrote me were nearly incomprehebsible. Either she is not very good at english or they are using some translation service that also is quite bad. That language barrier with her using wrong englisch words and sentence structure that made no sense at all may have added to the confusion.

That language barrier added an additional level of problems to all this.

So now I get a “new” Loona that most probably will break soon again. But nothing else to compensate me.

Side note: When I shipped my Loona to Fixit I of course expected to get her back, so I did not delete user data. This now also is a privacy concern, since there are personal data on that robot protected by European privacy laws. When I told her that she said that I will get the destroyed Loona back to me to protect my privacy. But as we can see from this so far they seem to have not thought about the privacy problems that arise from repair jobs.

All in all this was a very, VERY bad experience. Not only did they destroy my Loona, they are not able or willing to rasonably compensate me for the frustation and all the time I had to invest into this, trying to communicate with Fixit, communicating with KEYi trying to sort this mess  – and most of all for the loss of my robotic pet.

If you want to buy a Loona, please consider if you really want to buy a flawed robot that is very prone to breakage and does not do a lot of things advertised on the product page or in the Kickstarter for the insane amount of money they want for it. There is a high probability the robot will break, or will be further damaged or even destroyed in “repair”.

Better take your money elsewhere.

I now wait for the new Loona that from my experiences probably will break again in a week.

KEYi Tech should be aware of the fact that people see these robots as pets and get attached to them, and that is exactly what Loona is advertised as: a pet. But obviously they do not care if you loose your pet, otherwise they would act way more carefully.

For me: I will not buy anything from KEYi Tech ever again, regardless of what technical wonder they will promise next. It is very probable that the quality of any new products will be as bad as Loona’s – and so will be the support.

[Update]

This is from the latest mail I just got, to show you how incomprehensible the communication is:

it is not broken as you thougtt that badly, the mainboard inside was broken

They made video to our Factory Technician, and the problem seems to be fixed.

You can have a check, please do not find any faults in my poor language, we two both are not English Native speaker.

So what now? They told me my robot cannot be repaired, since the mainboard is broken. Now it is “not broken that badly”. And I did not “think” anything, she told me that the mainboard was broken. Now suddenly the robot that was broken beyond repair by their own words is “fixed”? And what should I “check”? There was no link to a video included.

This is getting more ridiculous by the minute. And my knowledge level of the english language definitely is not the problem here. KEYi should hire someone who actually is able to communicate in english or teach it to their support staff.