Qobuz Stole From My Account

[Johnseye]

The subject of this post is accurate and very unfortunate.  I regret writing this, but find it important to inform this community about what Qobuz has done and how they've responded to my request for restitution.  In November of 2019 I paid for an annual subscription to Qobuz.  They had a promo going on and I signed up for $149.99 for the year.  Payment was made using my PayPal account.  In May of this year I was going through my PayPal records, something I only do a few times a year.  I found that Xandrie (Qobuz's parent) had been charging me $14.99 since January which I did not authorize.

 

On June 23rd I submitted a ticket request with Qobuz informing them of the issue.  On June 24th Sebastien from Qobuz replied asking for additional information.  I provided screenprints of the transaction in the body of the email and downloaded the Xandrie/Qobuz statement from PayPal in a pdf and attached it to the email as well as other info. I didn't hear back from him.  On June 27th Qobuz charged my PayPal account for $14.99 again.  I followed up with Sebastien who informed me to cancel their service from my PayPal account so I wouldn't be charged again.  I did that.  He said if he didn't get back to me by July 13th (2 weeks later) to contact him again.  I contacted him on July 21st requesting a status.  He replied saying "Thanks for your follow up email. I'm sorry to say we can find no evidence of your monthly billing. Please cancel at PayPal while we continue to investigate your claim. If you have other email addresses we can look for that would be great."  I had already cancelled PayPal.  At this point Qobuz had charged my PayPal account a total of $89.94 from Jan - June without my authorization.

 

I emailed Sebastien back on July 21st with a pdf of each month's PayPal statement which included the Qobuz Transaction ID, Invoice ID and Order number.  I followed up on July 22nd and 23rd and received no response.  I followed up again on August 9th, then again on the 11th.  He finally replied saying "Thanks for your follow up email. Our billing department has authorized me to offer you a code for one month of Qobuz service or one complementary Hi-Res audio download."

I replied "Qobuz double charged me $89.94 for the months of Jan - June 2020.  One month of service does not equal $89.94.  I would either accept a credit of that amount toward continued Qobuz service or a refund to my payment method.  I would be happy to discuss this with you over the phone."

He replied on Aug 12th saying "Thanks for your follow up email. I'll let the billing team know you have rejected their offer. "

I replied on Aug 13th saying "Does billing understand how much I was overcharged?  Do they have the receipt copies I provided to you? What happens next?"

He replied on Aug 13th saying "Thanks for your follow up email. Yes, the billing team has all of your provided information. They offered you compensation, and you rejected the offer.  If there is anything else I can help you with, please let me know."

 

I have emailed Sebastien back 7 times since then asking him a simple question "Do you and your billing department recognize that you overcharged me $89.94?".  He has not responded.  I opened a new ticket request and he has not responded.

 

I filed complaints with PayPal for each month except January which was too long ago to file against.  PayPal sided in my favor and refunded me each of the transaction costs.  So I have recouped all but $14.99.  Several things upset me about this situation.  Qobuz being a French company is very difficult to communicate with.  I called Xandrie a couple times and spoke with someone once who could not help me. It was a black hole.  You have read Sebastien's comments verbatim here.  They just upset me to no end.  I rejected their offer of a download or free month when they charged my account $89.94 without authorization.

 

I authorized the annual charge and they used that authorization to continually charge me.  I have never experienced this before and now will need to check my PayPal statements monthly.  You may not think this is theft because I authorized the original annual charge which opened up the door to Qobuz, but they refused to return what they charged.  They provided no additional service for what they charged.  They now refuse to communicate.  That qualifies as theft.

 

[plissken]

I would post this on their social media pages: Linkdin, FaceBook, Twitter.  You only authorized 1 transaction.  Sorry to hear about your troubles. 

[rickca]

Wow, it sure sounds like their billing system is a mess.  Surely a little research on their part would readily confirm your documentation.  This is a very disappointing customer service story.

[dgilz]

You may have not found the official Qobuz issues thread here : 

 

[Kal Rubinson]

Try to post it on the Roon Labs Community.  Even if they pull it down, they have to take notice.

[Johnseye]

3 hours ago, dgilz said:

You may have not found the official Qobuz issues thread here : 

 

 

I found it back in July.

 

 

No response to that post so I contacted @David Craff via PM.  I asked for help and he said he did what he could.  I informed him ahead of time I would be sharing my experience.  His reply to me was:

"I am product manager at Qobuz for the PC & Mac application, I have no skills or rights in the management of customers and requests related to after sales support. I can only forward your request to the right people, which I did.
Sorry I can't do more. I hope the problem will be solved."

 

 

[Johnseye]

4 hours ago, plissken said:

I would post this on their social media pages: Linkdin, FaceBook, Twitter.  You only authorized 1 transaction.  Sorry to hear about your troubles. 

 

1 hour ago, Kal Rubinson said:

Try to post it on the Roon Labs Community.  Even if they pull it down, they have to take notice.

 

Thank you both for the recommendation.  I hadn't thought of communicating with them through their social media platforms.  I'll do that and at Roon. They will likely pull it from social media.  I would expect Chris and the folks at Roon to leave the post as it should give every Qobuz customer a warning to check their own accounts.  If this happened to me it has likely happened to others.

 

PayPal contacts the seller when a dispute is filed.  Either they didn't respond or they could not refute the evidence coming through that channel.  Sebastien's communication and service was just bad.

[Account Closed]

A caution we should all take is periodically reviewing and cancelling any automatic payments in PP that are no longer needed. 

[plissken]

22 hours ago, dgilz said:

You may have not found the official Qobuz issues thread here : 

 

 

That title leads me to believe it's for bugs in the programming...

[plissken]

19 hours ago, Johnseye said:

Thank you both for the recommendation.  I hadn't thought of communicating with them through their social media platforms.  I'll do that and at Roon. They will likely pull it from social media. 

 

1. Post to their social media anyways. Make sure to screen shot it. If on Windows you can search using 'snip' and it will bring up the snipping tool for screen capture. Alternatively you can go to screencastomatic.com and video capture your screen for free up to 15 minutes at a time.

 

2. Post it to your social media accounts so they can't delete it.

 

3. Use screencastomatic and create a video for YT and show all the documentation and walk your intended audience (billing people at Qobuz) through this. You are being gatekeepered by David Craft.

 

What he should be doing is giving you a name and # of someone that has the ability to pierce the corporate bureaucracy and make this right. But he's not. This means a couple of possibilities:

 

A: There is an internal policy designed to fire gap you from internal resources that can make this happen. That's a huge problem and I wouldn't do business with an entity I couldn't trust to be transparent.

 

B: David doesn't want to deal with you and he's passed the buck and washed his hands of both you and your situation that you've been placed in. Another large issue.

 

Either way it's a culture problem.

[firedog]

17 hours ago, plissken said:

B: David doesn't want to deal with you and he's passed the buck and washed his hands of both you and your situation that you've been placed in. Another large issue.

I don't think that's fair. It's not part of his job and he probably doesn't have access to the internal tools to deal with it.

If he forwarded it to the right people and asked them to look, he did what he should have. It shows an issue at Qobuz, but not with David. Too much involvement on his part would be seen as him overstepping his bounds and interfering in someone else's work responsibilities/job.

 

[feelingears]

@Johnseye Thank you for the public service announcement and sorry for your hassles. I appreciate that you just saved me from wasting my money on a company that doesn't have its customers and customer service front and center. Such a shame; I hope your social media efforts provide some remedy.

 

 

[firedog]

4 hours ago, feelingears said:

@Johnseye Thank you for the public service announcement and sorry for your hassles. I appreciate that you just saved me from wasting my money on a company that doesn't have its customers and customer service front and center. Such a shame; I hope your social media efforts provide some remedy.

 

 

@Johnseve has a definite gripe with the Qobuz; but those problems don't seem to be widespread. Seems the rest of us are happy customers.

[plissken]

On 8/31/2020 at 8:40 AM, firedog said:

I don't think that's fair. It's not part of his job and he probably doesn't have access to the internal tools to deal with it.

If he forwarded it to the right people and asked them to look, he did what he should have. It shows an issue at Qobuz, but not with David. Too much involvement on his part would be seen as him overstepping his bounds and interfering in someone else's work responsibilities/job.

 

 

I think it is. David doesn't have to be an accountant to figure out a Quobuz customer is simply being stolen from. I co-managed a Mac repair shop for 18 months. When there was an issue and the customer was right I didn't act as a firewall between them and the entity that could make it right. I gave out a name and a phone # and made it the owners problem.

 

David isn't pushing a broom at Quobuz. He's a product manager. So manage the product and I believe that includes their image.

[DuckToller]

On 8/30/2020 at 9:33 PM, plissken said:

A: There is an internal policy designed to fire gap you from internal resources that can make this happen. That's a huge problem and I wouldn't do business with an entity I couldn't trust to be transparent.

 

B: David doesn't want to deal with you and he's passed the buck and washed his hands of both you and your situation that you've been placed in. Another large issue.

@plissken
You are probalbly right with A:,  but I would rather agree with @firedog about B: that there is little you can do in his position rather than forward the issue internally.

A: This is unfortunately a standard procedure in modern customer service companies.
In opposite to Amazon, where you can get from an agent even 23 month after you bought your item a 100% refund, most customer service agents nowadays have a very tiny credit note limit, if at all.

My active customer service experience includes one case where the demanded credit note expenditure exceeded the CS VP's (my then boss) signature authorization, which subsequently led to his decision to leave 5000 wrongly billed customer back to the first level CS rather than fixing the problem automatically and talking with his bosses about the billing system issue. That's not culture but policy.

If you look at this from the finance dept. side, they just won't spend money which is already in the books, therefore they'll leave the the problem with the sales side. If cs/sales would have been clever, they would have offered from the beginning a 6 month prolonged service or maybe another year for free to cover everything up, but that did not happen. I would think that people like@David.. Qobuz, Hi-Res Music Evangelist won't support that CS practice, but they can't know about everything.

 

On 8/30/2020 at 9:33 PM, plissken said:

Either way it's a culture problem.

 

Could you pls explain which type of culture you refer to ??? Culture wars?

 

Cheers, Tom

[plissken]

2 minutes ago, DuckToller said:

Could you pls explain which type of culture you refer to ??? Culture wars?

 

Cheers, Tom

 

Business Culture. Where I work if I had this nature of problem I know I have a line to the C level executives. It's simply part of the culture. Also they wouldn't let it get to that point I believe.

[DuckToller]

 

2 minutes ago, plissken said:

Where I work if I had this nature of problem I know I have a line to the C level executives. It's simply part of the culture. Also they wouldn't let it get to that point I believe.

Agreed that this is often helpful.

[feelingears]

5 hours ago, firedog said:

@Johnseve has a definite gripe with the Qobuz; but those problems don't seem to be widespread. Seems the rest of us are happy customers.

 

Indeed, fair enough. This post came up just as I was about to give Qobuz a try, and I abhor poor customer service (because I deal with so much of it managing elderly parents' affairs on top of my own). I'm customer-facing in software; I know it's hard to please everyone. I expect the accounting team to do better though–it's just debits and credits and you have allowances for customer issues, so just fix the damn problem please.

 

Good luck, better listening!

 

[Johnseye]

6 hours ago, firedog said:

@Johnseve has a definite gripe with the Qobuz; but those problems don't seem to be widespread. Seems the rest of us are happy customers.

 

45 minutes ago, feelingears said:

 

Indeed, fair enough. This post came up just as I was about to give Qobuz a try, and I abhor poor customer service (because I deal with so much of it managing elderly parents' affairs on top of my own). I'm customer-facing in software; I know it's hard to please everyone. I expect the accounting team to do better though–it's just debits and credits and you have allowances for customer issues, so just fix the damn problem please.

 

Good luck, better listening!

 

 

@firedog Unless of course you include those who've commented in the Roon thread I started.  I suspect when you run into a similar situation as I have, where Qobuz needs to provide either a credit or a refund, you stand a good chance of having difficulty.

 

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/qobuz-stole-from-my-account/119074