According to a research by 1st Financial Training services, 96% of unhappy customers don’t complain, 91% of those will simply leave and never come back.
If the above is anywhere near true (even if exaggerated) then Tecno is in for a big surprise around the corner judging by the volume of complaints they have.

A little history

My first Tecno phone was a Tecno M3 and my room mate got a Tecno N3. This was back in 2013. Back then, you dared not mention Tecno in a public forum else you would get buried in an avalanche of insults.
It was the era of Samsung, HTC, LG, iPhones etc and those weren’t cheap. I did like the idea of Android being cheap enough for the average Joe and supported it. I got more than my fair share of insults as you can imagine. There was also the BBM matter; Blackberry users refusing to accept requests from non-Blackberry PINS
BBM users reject non-BBM PIN requests
It was chaos back then.
Hovatek went ahead to start the first Tecno stock rom collection. They were done by first rooting then backing up using MTK Droid tool, hence we named them MTK backups.
Many tutorials followed and we’ve since become one of the (if not the) top providers of free online support to Tecno users because we’ve followed this brand closely.

What is Tecno doing wrong?

Many things actually but I’ll stick to the ones I’ve consistently bumped into very bitter complaints about.

Lack of version updates

This has been a Tecno thing since they started rolling out Android phones. Early Tecno phones didn’t even have an OTA update feature. The only Tecno phones to have ever received version updates were the Tecno Camon C8 and Tecno Phantom 6 Plus, both of which were disasters. The rule of thumb with Tecno is that you have to buy a new Tecno phone to enjoy a version update.

Very Buggy HIOS

The Elephant in the room. HIOS is the biggest problem of Tecno phones. How Tecno still doesn’t see this is startling. Tecno phones have good specs on paper but end up in a horrible experience shortly after one begins using. To further degrade the experience, OTA updates which are supposed to make the phones better only end up making them worse. Tecno Camon X and Camon X Pro users are one of the latest casualties here.

No regard for customers

The Tecno Forum, for one, is flooded with bitter complaints which nobody seems interested in addressing. It seems to me like the Admins have their hands tied and the moderators don’t exist.
The latest fiasco is the font restore saga; #BringBackOurFonts . Last year, Tecno began removing the font-changing app via OTA updates. Tecno users (surprisingly) love their fonts and have complained bitterly about this.
As at the middle of 2018, members were promised that fonts will be restored in December 2018, that never came. They then promised February 2019, nothing. Then it was promised April 2019. This is May 1 and still nothing.
What slays it is that they don’t issue any statement or apology. Restoring Tecno fonts via root isn’t a biggie but if a brand like Tecno can’t professionally address an issue as minor as fonts, its paints a grim picture.
As expected, they didn’t keep their ‘Around the end of June’ promise.
Tecno font OTA update

Showbiz matters more than user experience

Tecno seems to be all about the Showbiz. So much pomp and pageantry around the Tecno Spark 3 launch only for it to stop getting official support months later. The same fate befell even past Tecno flagships.
I believe Word of mouth and user experience are the ultimate marketing tactics, not flaunting celebrities who have obviously been paid and are neither buying nor using the device. Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.

Believing their own press clippings

Some bloggers also share in the blame. If you pay some bloggers to sing, they will sing, clap and dance. There are also bloggers who ‘review’ phones they’ve never seen let alone touched. This doesn’t help brands get the true picture of how we perceive their phones.
Have you tried googling a Tecno, Infinix or Itel phone’s specs? even among websites whose primary niche is phone specs, the level of misinformation is crazy. Potential users see one thing online and another after purchasing; a recipe for disappointment.

Conclusion

Transsion (Tecno, Infinix and Itel) rode the ‘affordable Android’ train to prominence but that advantage has been eroded. You now have Tecno users porting to the likes of Xiaomi, Oppo, VIVO, Huawei and Samsung because there’s now an avalanche of affordable (even cheap) Android phones. They now want value for money and a good user experience.
Listening to and reading a lot of Tecno users complaints over the years, the most logical conclusion one can draw is that Tecno just doesn’t care!

What has your Tecno experience been like? Will your next phone be a Tecno phone?