A lot has changed for Ring over the years as it has transitioned through new generations of its products and got bought out by Amazon for a whopping $1 billion. It went from being a new name in the video doorbell business, competing against a number of other companies, to becoming one of the most recognized names out there.
The company originally made its name by offering excellent customer service, a fascinating product, a fantastic app, and always including everything you could ever need in the box (mostly). From the little bits and pieces like screws and anchors to multiple colored faceplate options to match the color of your home best.
However, like any other company, change always takes its toll as packaging is simplified, accessories are reduced down to more simplistic options, and customer support gets bogged down by having far too many customers (and likely less agents). This can lead to various unfortunate issues down the line.
One of the latest that Ring seems to be suffering from is keeping up with its offer of sending out a free alternative faceplate color of a customer’s choosing upon registering their Ring doorbell. The reason for this offer is that the company chose to halt including multiple options within the box. Instead, choosing to send out the new doorbells with just the default silver faceplate.
This makes complete sense because if you are only ever going to use one faceplate cover, it is a complete waste to include others in the box as they are just going to collect dust in storage somewhere or end up in the dump. So this reduces waste (and saves the company money along the way).
When users register their new doorbell within the app, they get a notification to expect an email where they can choose a color to be sent out to them if the default plate doesn’t match their home. An honest and respectable offer to keep some of the traditions going for the company.
However, it appears that there are a lot of customers that never get this email. They get all the other associated emails but nothing mentioning a faceplate. We recent came across this in a conversation with someone a few months ago and then witnessed it recently ourselves.
One of our colleagues recently ordered a Ring Pro 2 model from Amazon and saw the same notification. It reminded them of the past conversation but they moved on with installing it and didn’t think too much about it. At least, until they realized they had an email welcoming them to the new doorbell, but nothing that mentioned anything about a faceplate.
So we started doing some research to see if it went back further than just the last few months. This is where we discovered all sorts of conversations about it spanning everything from Reddit to Ring’s own community website, some going as far back as last year. It didn’t seem like any of the mentions involved getting the matter resolved. Many of them includes attempts made to reach out to Ring customer service. Some of them were referred to Amazon where Amazon referred them back to Ring saying Amazon is just the store where Ring is the manufacturer (and the promise is made in the app, not Amazon).
At this point, there seemed to be mixed opinions being offered to customers and those opinions continue to be mixed to this very day. None of them (allegedly) leading to an answer. So if you have experienced this yourself, fear not as you are not alone.
We haven’t reached out to Ring for comment just yet as our colleague has asked us to give them a little time in case it takes up to a week before an email arrives. So the company has a few more days before we make our attempts. However, that didn’t stop us from talking about.
All we can recommend now is to reach out to Ring directly, if you do decide to do so. Reaching out to Amazon will likely lead to a dead end and their reasoning is justifiable (Ring is the “manufacturer”, not Amazon). Even though Amazon owns Ring, it doesn’t mean that everything operates out of shared buildings or teams.
