Todd was having problems with his Samsung Galaxy phone, so he traded it in for a refurbished warranty replacement. The replacement phone turned out to be defective, too. Rather than enter the perpetual cycles of smartphone replacement purgatory, he knew there had to be another way. He looked for one, and found it in a recent post about a reader who deduced the e-mail address of Samsung’s CEO and used that information to get the company to actually honor its warranty.

We don’t normally recommend going nuclear this soon, but we’ve heard stories about repeated replacements of Samsung Galaxy handsets and it may be that it was wise of Todd to be proactive.

He writes:

I wanted to share another Samsung success story with you. I recently read the post about the Samsung laptop and emailing the CEO.

Yesterday [Thursday] I emailed the CEO of Samsung at 7pm EST. It was about a defective Galaxy Nexus phone which had been replaced once. I sent it in a second time and it took over a week to get logged into the repair system after being delivered.

This morning I received a phone call from Samsung telling me they are overnighting me, Saturday delivery, a new replacement phone.

It really does pay to send an email, even if it is to the top dog.

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