Hotpoint and its crap after sales service

Hi

Just wanted to vent my venom with regards to a Hotpoint fridge we bought just over a year ago. We bought a fridge and dishwasher (both Hotpoint) from Currys as part of a new kitchen purchase but thats another story !!

The fridge decided to die a few weeks before the warranty ran out at the beginning of November last year – so we called out Hotpoint and god bless them they came within a week. After that we decided to take out an extended warranty on both the fridge and dishwaher (again another story). So unlucky or lucky for us (depends how you look at it) when the fridge broke down again all we thought we had to do was called the good old Hotpoint service centre up and book an engineer. That was on the 29th of December 2004 (a Wednesday). the service centre told us that it would be the following week before they come have an engineer out. So at that time of year we thought Ok – we did tell them that we had a 3 month old baby that required us to have a fridge so that we could refridgerate her feeds – made little difference to the service centre – it was still going to be a week. Later that day we get a phone call saying that the engineer booked wasn’t trained so they would have to reschedule to the Thursday – Ok another day we could just about handle that. We waited the week – a card arrived saying that the engineer would arrive on the Thursday. On the Wednesday we get another phone call from the so called SERVICE centre ( they do know the meaning of the word don’t they?) saying that they would have to cancel again – the engineer was ill. They would have to re-schedule to today the 12th of January – 2 weeks after the fridge broke down. Guess what – no really – your right they cancelled again – it was the weather this time. They then re-schedule to Monday 17th of January 2005. If they do actually send an engineer it will be nearly three weeks since the fridge broke down. I could have had an independant repairer in and had the fridge fixed probably within the first week. I have tried to contact the service centre to resolve this matter on numerous occasions without success. You just cannot get past the front line staff – Supervisors and managers such as Andy Ayres/Gordon Wedgewood refuse to talk to you or return your calls. You have to laugh especialy when you read the crap on their website – see front page – great stuff like –

HOTPOINT to quote the website’s frontpage

“Helping families in the real world”

“Superior After Sales Care”

Once you’ve bought your appliances, we don’t stop there. Our After Sales Care is second to none so you can be sure that we will be there to support you quickly and effectively.”

So I suppose my final line should be is there anything I can do to get my fridge fixed this year !!

cheers

D