blink Customer Service Experience

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BC3

Active member
Joined
Apr 1, 2011
Messages
30
Location
Encino, CA
I had my blink L2 charger installed earlier this week. The electric charging part works great but it cannot connect to my wireless network. It seems silly to me that ECOtality is expecting electric contractors to conduct (pun intended) network connections. They worked very hard to get it to connect and even went to Radio Shack to purchase a 100ft network cable to test a hard wire connection to my network. No luck. I reluctantly signed off on the installation realizing the charger delivers electricity to the car (their job) and the network issue resides with someone else (me if it’s my network, blink if it’s the box).

I was hesitant to call blink customer service thinking the newness of the service would be a nightmare to deal. I couldn’t be more wrong. Yesterday I called from work and explained my situation. The customer service rep told me they would walk through the set up with me to troubleshoot. I’m on the west coast and they are on the east coast so I expected it would be days before we hooked up. Wrong again. The same night at 7pm PDT a blink rep called me to work on fixing the issue. He had a network technician on the line again as well. Long-story-short, the three of us spent nearly 1 hour working on the issue. Not to get into too much detail but my box was set up all wrong (IP address, subnet mask, etc… were all wrong). They also want me to have a stronger signal so they are contacting my local ECOtality coordinator to arrange for someone to come out and install a power line adapter to improve the network signal in my garage. The net tech and CS rep were super polite through the entire process – continuously apologizing for the set up issues and patiently walking me through my network set up. It’s comforting to know that blink has the resources in place to help with set up and future issues I might encounter with my charger.
 
BC3 said:
I had my blink L2 charger installed earlier this week. The electric charging part works great but it cannot connect to my wireless network. It seems silly to me that ECOtality is expecting electric contractors to conduct (pun intended) network connections. They worked very hard to get it to connect and even went to Radio Shack to purchase a 100ft network cable to test a hard wire connection to my network. No luck. I reluctantly signed off on the installation realizing the charger delivers electricity to the car (their job) and the network issue resides with someone else (me if it’s my network, blink if it’s the box).

I was hesitant to call blink customer service thinking the newness of the service would be a nightmare to deal. I couldn’t be more wrong. Yesterday I called from work and explained my situation. The customer service rep told me they would walk through the set up with me to troubleshoot. I’m on the west coast and they are on the east coast so I expected it would be days before we hooked up. Wrong again. The same night at 7pm PDT a blink rep called me to work on fixing the issue. He had a network technician on the line again as well. Long-story-short, the three of us spent nearly 1 hour working on the issue. Not to get into too much detail but my box was set up all wrong (IP address, subnet mask, etc… were all wrong). They also want me to have a stronger signal so they are contacting my local ECOtality coordinator to arrange for someone to come out and install a power line adapter to improve the network signal in my garage. The net tech and CS rep were super polite through the entire process – continuously apologizing for the set up issues and patiently walking me through my network set up. It’s comforting to know that blink has the resources in place to help with set up and future issues I might encounter with my charger.

Pretty darn good service by Blink.....thanks for sharing.
 
In a similar vein, during our install the contractor contacted Ecotality/Blink support for help, and we ended up escalated to someone with solid skills who ended up figuring out and solving the problem by remotely connecting to my laptop, then using command line networking tools along with digging into our router config through its browser interface. It obviously helped that I had a laptop handy and was able to give them remote access, but it was impressive nonetheless. (They should promote the guy that helped us to the QA team for the software!)
 
On the non-technical side, my experience with them has also been excellent. Had an issue with the electronic signature of the agreement, fixed immediately. Took delivery of my LEAF but no charger, get scheduled within days. Very impressed so far.
 
I really like hearing success stories since Eco/Blink is holding $100,000,000.00 of our money. Does anyone know how many chargers they have installed so far???
 
TRONZ said:
I really like hearing success stories since Eco/Blink is holding $100,000,000.00 of our money. Does anyone know how many chargers they have installed so far???

It's funny you mention the $100M. The entire time I was on the phone I kept thinking that this customer service model isn't sustainable. How much are they paying to have two highly qualified employees (1 was a senior network technician) based in eastern U.S. spend an hour on the phone with one customer when most cust serv models have those calls (the ones that make it out of an automated environment) routed to India.

Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for the help - for once it's seems like an advantage to be an early adopter.
 
Everyone I've dealt with from blink/Ecotality has been a class act. Most recently, I described the issues I was having with the charge timer and network connectivity in an email and they replied within five minutes with detailed instructions. Twenty minutes later the firmware fix was in and my EVSE is now working perfectly.
 
I've sent several emails that were never responded to... I'm pretty sure I will need their help but thought I would wait until my Leaf comes before calling. I am reassured by these experiences.
 
Support is unbelievably good. It has to be hard for the support guys (and gals) since they are dealing with a thousand different pieces of equipment and customers with varying degrees of network knowledge. They may not be able to fix the problem but not for want of trying or knowledge.
 
Despite my vocal complaints on this board about my frustration in forcing me to "upgrade" my perfectly working Clipper Creek to a non-working Blink, I will say, they do seem genuinely concerned and working hard to make things right. I get calls from them every couple of days asking about how it's going. It looks like (at least for me) they finally got things right with v1.5 so that was only a few days of inconvenience.
 
my experience has been first class.
this and the sleep setting needed are the only remaining issues:

The blink and its intranet show a time difference of an hour and cant be synched.
All settings are manual, including DST.
The time on the Blink is 6:59.
the time on the intranet is 7:59.
I can adjust the intranet time to the correct time, which is 6:59
but then the Blink will move to 5:59.
When I got it, it was set to Arizona time. Is that the solution?
 
Among these primarily positive experiences, I get to relate one of the first negative experiences. It took almost three weeks from our initial contact to get our J-1772 connector replaced. Granted, I was in no rush as our 120-volt trickle charge was satisfactory for our needs, but for those that would need the Blink for their personal driving requirements, I was not impressed. Here is the story, with photos, if you'd like to read more.
 
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