Oura’s Mind-Bogglingly-Good Failed Ring Experiance

I don’t tend to talk about customer service bits much, unless they get so bad that enough people e-mail me that I have to look into it. The reason is relatively simple: It varies a ton, especially (and often) by geography, product groups, exactly what someone’s unit broke, etc… Still, there are general trends I’m aware of at each company.

And in fact, one such trend (currently) is AI chatbots for support. Everyone wants to use them to try and stall you from talking to a real person (which costs real money), but most of the time it just wastes your time and frustrates you.

Which is why I decided to write this post. Because for the first time in the history of the universe, an AI support chatbot was actually good. A week or so ago, I had finally gotten frustrated with my Oura V4 ring having a battery life lasting little more than a day (I bought it last October 2024, so barely a year old). I had noticed it was requiring an awful lot of charging over the course of the fall, but it wasn’t really my primary go-to device. So when the battery died…mostly shrug (just simply left me with less comparative data sets for sleep data).

In any case, I noticed in the Oura app there was a support chat option, and figured maybe it’d quickly escalate me to a human. It did not. Instead, in just over 90 seconds, it completed the task at hand and had a replacement unit being repaired.

So, Friday morning I started the chat session, and simply noted it wasn’t lasting 36 hours (which, was a best-case scenario to be honest). It instantly responded that it had sent me an email to approve access to the account. I’m not entirely sure why it needed this since I was already logged in, but I’m guessing there’s some technical two-step that’s actually happening here behind the scenes. No biggie, took like 3 seconds. Within a few seconds of that, it spilled out this wall of text, basically saying they ‘discovered’ an issue with my ring, and it needed to be replaced.

As you can see, it offered to send me a new ring. It then asked if I was ready to proceed. Sure, and again, a few seconds later, it confirmed the exact model/size/variant, followed by the shipping address it had on file.

And then roughly a minute later, it said it was all set. This entire process, end to end, was barely 2 minutes long (including me going back and taking screenshots). No humans to chat with, no waiting for whatever, no long texting back and forth. No further explanation of the issue. Just me starting off with a semi-terse text and hoping for the best.

In the meantime, I let my existing ring charge, so I could make it through the night.

Now, by lunchtime, just a bit over 90 minutes later, I had already received an e-mail from UPS with my tracking number (directly from UPS). Super streamlined, not 5 duplicate e-mails. Just one e-mail from Oura summarizing the replacement, and one e-mail from UPS with delivery change/preference options/etc….

And by Monday at lunch (one business day later), the UPS man knocked on my door to deliver the package. To an island…in the Mediterranean! Most other companies that send stuff to me (with priority/press handling and humans involved) can barely make it show up in the same month, let alone the next business day. I unboxed it the next day and got things quickly setup in the app.

So far, the battery is doing well (as expected). Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out this is the second time I’ve had to replace an Oura ring due to the battery dying unexpectedly. Though last time I did it (in March 2024 with an older V3 ring), they also replaced it immediately – back then with human support intervention. In looking at the e-mail support chain, it wasn’t hard, but there was a whole lot of manual ‘find your serial number’ type steps involved (despite sending them my exact order number). So this is an improvement for sure!

Anyway, I just wanted to point this out. In a sea of crappy AI support experiences, kudos to Oura for sticking the landing on this one.

With that, back to editing other backlogged reviews.