Well, like every other e-bike manufacturer/seller these days Juiced Bikes is inundated with customer service inquiries due to doubling or tripling of sales in a short period of time and haven't been able to keep up with them. Many or all are hiring additional folks. Quoted from a recent Electrek article, "[Rad Bikes] Founder Mike Radenbaugh explained in a call with Electrek several months ago in the early days of the pandemic: “We’re already hiring like crazy, our customer support team is up to about 40 or 50 right now, I’m not even sure. It’s hard to keep track. We should be up to around 70 in the next month or so.”"
Juiced Bikes is no different, and recent communications from their founder specified that they knew they had a customer service issue and were working to resolve it. Juiced Bikes has actually been double or triple slammed lately due first to COVID shutting down their engineering and production as they were trying to complete the Scorpion/HyperScorpion project, the massive increase in their e-bike sales, and then quality or design issues relating to the HyperScorpion.
I was an early pre-order purchaser of the HyperScorpion, and my bike was one of the ones with 'issues' (total loss of power to motor after having ridden it about 10 miles).
No, I was never able to speak with anyone by phone at Juiced Bikes. Yes, at times it did take 'too long' for customer support to respond to my service ticket. Yes, I even got responses directly from Tora Harris to my service ticket, as even he was pitching in at times to deal with Juiced's customer service/support issues.
Ultimately things got resolved. Fairly early in the process Juiced determined that they needed to just send me a replacement bike. Unfortunately none were available for a few weeks. Ultimately they did become available and Juiced wanted me to pack up my non-functional bike and return it to them (on their dime) so that they could then ship out the replacement. Unfortunately after the bike initially worked properly, I had recycled the carton and packing materials.
Much to my surprise Juiced Bikes then shipped me the replacement bike and said 'box up and return the old one in the new box.' This was a very interesting process, 'undressing' the protective materials off the new bike and dressing them back onto the non-functioning bike while performing a synchronized disassembly and assembly of 2 bikes.
The new Hyper works great so far. I certainly do hope that Juiced figured out the root cause(s) of the failures and was able to address them. The entire process (from date of opening service ticket to having a functional bike) took just shy of 2 months. At least half of that was related to obtaining the next production batch of Hypers from China. Patience and perseverance on my part was a necessity to getting the situation ultimately resolved.
My case is very different from others, and I understand that. My wife and I have multiple e-bikes and we ride daily. We could afford to wait for the process to happen and still ride every day. If my HyperScorpion had been my first or only e-bike, it would have been incredibly difficult for me to have been very patient at all.
Is it a good situation? We all agree that it is not, very much including the manufacturer/sellers. But it is a situation they have found themselves in pretty much 'overnight', and it is not one which they can immediately correct. Hiring and training effective people takes time, especially during a period where many, many thousands of new people are only now discovering e-bikes, and require various levels of support (whether due to issues, or just the "how do I ..." questions with a product which is unfamiliar to them). I don't believe that it will be possible to resolve customer support issues regarding e-bikes very quickly. This applies across the board to all manufacturers/sellers.
