Don't buy from Sennheiser
Hello there!
I just wanted to went about my experience with Sennheiser customer service somewhere since I believe that this is not how a company should behave in order to retain their customers.
It all started two years ago, in may 2019. I was looking for some new headphones since my old ones were failing. I did some research, read some reviews and started looking toward buying something from Sennheiser. I had previously owned a pair of Sennheiser headphones, and I had enjoyed them a lot. Since I have an external microphone I looked for headphones only, not headsets as it would be redundant.
In the end I landed on Sennheiser HD599. They had everything I wanted, lightweight, open soundstage, lots of passthrough. Since It was my birthday soon my girlfriend decided to buy them for me as a gift. I was very happy with them when they arrived, they were everything I wanted. I quickly fell in love with how comfortable they were to wear, and the sound was great.
Fast forward to earlier this year. I started noticing some slight discomfort when wearing my headphones. I felt with my hands while not wearing the headphones and couldn't feel anything. But I still felt that discomfort when I was wearing them. I tried feeling along the headband while wearing them, sure enough I could feel something sticking out on the underside of the headband. Some part of the headband must have snapped and was now pressing against the fabric of headband from the inside. It is not super noticable, but it is there and causing some discomfort.
I contacted the retailer from where I bought the headphones about this issue. They sent me a return label and asked me to package everything that came with the box. I did so and sent the package to them in the beggining of the week. I was already missing my headphones at this point, I had some spare headphones around but they were not nearly as comfortable. I was not expecting to get brand new headphones or anything and I was willing to pay for repairs since I was very happy with the headphones.
More than a month passes without any word regarding my headphones. I checked the retailers website and there it said that they had sent the headphones to Sennheiser for repairs. This would add an aditonal 10-20 workdays to the 10 days it would take for the retailer to process my claim. That's why it had been so long. I started my claim on the march 6, on april 8 I got a message from the retailer that they needed to get in touch with me. They gave me a number to call and so I did.
It turns out that they found nothing wrong with my headphones over at Sennheiser. They claimed to have compared them to 3 identical headphones and found no discrepencies. They had also sent the headphones back to retailer withouth contacting me. So they asked me what I wanted to do with the headphones, if I wanted them to send them back to me. I thought yeah, I would like my headphones back. I thought it was quite strange that they found nothing wrong with them, even though I described that the issue only arises when you wear the headphones and there is tension in the headband.
I decided to contact Sennheiser direclt this time, expressing my displeasure with they service and describing the issue in even more detail. I also told them that I would gladly supply them with videos and pictures showing the issue at hand. I recieved a standard atuomated response with a return address. I would also have to pay for shipping in order to send them the package. I thought that's a bit unusual but okay. Normally the shipping would cost me around 6 euro (we do not use euro in my country so I have converted it for easier understanding.) As it turns out though, their headquarters for my reigion is in another country, so shipping to the return address would cost me 19 euro.
I tried contacting them again asking for more clarification about my errand and what I could expect this time. I also expressed my hesitancy toward paying 19 euro to send them the package since they could not find anything wrong with it last time. That's where I am now. I have not recieved a response yet.
Before this experience I was very happy with my headphones, I still am happy with the headphones. But now I find it hard to recomend this company to people and I will be keeping this in mind next time I need to buy new headphones. This whole experience was exacerbated since during this time I also had some issues with other another electronics item. When I contacted this the company of this product about maybe acquiring spare parts since they carried spare parts for other products, they instead offered to replace the item with a new one.
10 May 2021
Unprompted review