Sony’s Customer Service

Last night I rushed home in time to get some PS3 trophy hunting done in LittleBigPlanet while the gf was having a night out on the tiles. Loaded up the game and got stuck into a co-op game on a community level (I’m after the community based trophies!). After quite a bit of lag the level finished and we all exited to continue elsewhere.

Except I didn’t. The game froze and no amount of button pressing could get the console to work. Had to restart the machine and then found it wouldn’t recognise the game disc. Popped another disc in (Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, if you were wondering!) and it loaded and then froze. After searching around OnR having remembered something about discs not being recognised, found a possible solution which involved deleting all game data and then restarting the games.

But this didn’t work and after trying a number of other games I deduced, like Sherlock Holmes, that the issue must lie with the blu-ray laser as normal DVDs played fine.

There has been a spate of 60GB PS3s dying recently according to numerous posts on OnR, and not wanting to have to fork out £145, I quickly signed up to Continuous Play with the intention of leaving it a week and then calling them to tell them my PS3 had died.

This morning I phoned Sony just to find out if there was anything I could do to try and fix the problem (a re-boot, format, a good kicking…) and after a bit of diagnostics while on the phone they told me that it would need replacing. Then they noticed that I had Continuous Play cover and told me that I could have a replacement sent out to me tomorrow. Even though the poilcy was signed up less than 10 hours previously.

I was gobsmacked and was certain I’d be rumbled, but here was a major company actually doing something for the consumer instead of trying to wangle themselves out of any responsibility.

So kudos to Sony, that is what I call excellent customer service!