It looks like Microsoft is trying to cut some of it’s extended warranty costs by giving gamers the power to manage their own repair process.
On August 3rd, Microsoft flipped the switch on service.xbox.com. To use this site, you need to have a login to xbox.com (your Windows Live ID) as well as have your system registered with xbox.com.
Service.xbox.com will let gamers setup an in-warranty repair, out of warranty repair as well as track where your system is in the process. For out of warranty repairs, gamers will receive a $5 discount if they use the website rather than calling it in.
The site is being promoted as a quicker way to get your system repaired. But lets face it, the more people that use this, the fewer call center folks they need to employee to handle all the calls for broken systems. We already know the new warranty is going to cost them billions.
So if you happen to be one of the unfortunate victims of poor design, you might want to give service.xbox.com a try. Please post in the forums how your experience went, we’d be interested in knowing. What would be even better is if you’ve had a repair done the old way and you could contrast the process with this new method. Judging by the failure rate of the 360, I'm sure this wont be to hard to come by.
