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Re: Comet Service & Customer Aftercare
foc repairs . probally to apease poor customer who purchased some peice of cr#p which hasnt lasted the time of day ..
cutomers fault for buying / comets fault for selling , poor engineers stuck in middle …
the joys ..
ps wonder if repair hadnt been foc , would customer went ahead ..
Re: Comet Service & Customer Aftercare
Maybe the reason Comet & DSG sell these machines is that this all the customer can afford at that time.
So do you not sell them or do you provide a service for everyone regardless of buying ability??
As for FOC repairs most companies HAVE to go on a sliding scale depending on if major part or not. Most offer a foc call out to advised on repair cost / or if free.
Also think about it if it were not for the likes of these poorer quality machine being sold how many repairs would you be getting ???
Remember the UK is very small compared to the rest of the European market so Kesa & DSG do not have that much buying power as previously stated. One example of this I heard of the other day was DSG stopped selling Sony Tv’s due to parts costs, after a year went back to Sony and Begged to restart selling there Tv’s.
helo_75 wrote:would u openly advertise free repairs?
If that question’s for me helo then no, i certainly bloody wouldnt, but then i dont sell the things.
No, im just curious why in cometbez’s neck of the woods your company seems to be apparently very generous in dishing out free out of guarantee repairs, but my customers experiences round these parts seem a bit different.Dont get me wrong, if repairs FOC outwith the guarantee period are commonly carried out by Kesa then that is to be applauded, in fact i wish the EU would introduce a minimum 2 year guarantee on all electrical appliances, that would see quality rise across the board IMO.
Lerch, i really dont think the cheap garbage on sale everywhere these days does much for my business, the very fact they are cheap means they’re much more likely to simply be chucked anyway, and the faults that do crop up tend often to be towards the BER end of the scale.
I was much busier in the days when most machines were pretty well made, i havnt really changed my way of trading or fallen out with many customers 😉 yet the phone rings much less 🙁
Got to blame the disposable domestic appliance i would say :tdown:Madmac wrote:I was much busier in the days when most machines were pretty well made, i havnt really changed my way of trading or fallen out with many customers 😉 yet the phone rings much less 🙁
Slight correction that I feel compelled to make…
You were much busier when the cost of a new appliance was a serious consideration when weighed against the potential cost of repair.
Madmac wrote:Got to blame the disposable domestic appliance i would say :tdown:
Another correction, my apologies…
No.
The fact that there were cheap appliances available that didn’t/don’t last a long have become a problem. What consumers do is bury their heads in the sand and sing Kumbya in the hope that they will last as long and perform as well as something that is actually designed to do the job and last beyond a couple of years.
The truth is, that isn’t a truth.
Also true is that most major retailers have done absolutely nothing, not a Goddam thing, to advise people to the contrary and so, they think that they can have their cake and eat it.
Manufacturers, driven by market demands and trends as well as (very much so) those of retailers fighting to be the cheapest on the planet, have manufactured goods to suit as, after all, that’s what people want… isn’t it?
If one manufacturer won’t supply a whatever appliance at whatever price, it’s okay, there’s this Turkish, Chinese or whatever is next company that will do so. Probably for less. After a while the major brand names, who rely on volume to survive, have little choice but to try to compete in the new playing field that they find themselves in.
Do I blame anyone in particular for the situation that we, as well as other industries find ourselves in? No, not really.
What you can or, rather, who you can, blame for it all is the end users who want it all, want it now and want it for next to nothing. The rest of the chain is merely trying to play to those consumer demands.
Until the public actually wise up and get a grip of reality the situation is unlikely to change.
K.
Re: Comet Service & Customer Aftercare
In those good old golden days before I joined the trade, (things always seem to start going downhill when I join, I’ve no idea why :?) I wonder what proportion of the population actually owned a front loading automatic, and how many times a week they used it?
I would speculate that today’s machines get more of a hammering (misses modern ain’t got time to measure in the detergent, sort the load, or worry if it’s walking about the kitchen) and to not own one (in the UK) is pretty exceptional. So, whilst robustness has had to suffer to meet the changing market, I think there might also be these other factors to take into account. We may well see container loads of BER machines on their way to be scrapped but when all is said and done, those “unlucky” customers have often had two to five years use for a paltry £174.99. In real terms, adjusting for inflation and the price of fish, this might not be so bad, from their point of view, as compared with the time when some of the old g1ts on here started their businesses.:D
Mike.kwatt wrote:
Slight correction that I feel compelled to make…
You were much busier when the cost of a new appliance was a serious consideration when weighed against the potential cost
And thats mainly because they were mostly reasonably well made.. and that costs 😉
They were so much more repairable too, so quite often you’d see a Hotpoint say at 3 or 4 years old for its first brush change & then maybe care for it for the next 10 years or so 😯
Now my typical day is spent dealing with machines which are mostly 3/5 yrs old and get one or two repairs before the customer decides they’re worn out and starts again.So I’ll stand by my point about the disposable domestic appliance being to blame for my slim fast bank balance 😉 but how & why we’ve arrived at this point has indeed many reasons.
Extreme competition, & Joe public expecting to get a top notch washer for £300 decade after decade are certainly the main drivers of this trend though 🙁
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