Judged Fairly

[kwatt]

Leading on from another post that you can here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=65250#p321646

I recently received a letter from DAG saying that the Beko service work was moving along with, at a guess, all the other DAG service agents. Apparently, according to the posts here it’s going to British Gas.

Now that doesn’t really bother me much, it’s just the ebb and flow of business and, no doubt something else will come along in time to replace the workload. No, what bothers me is something else entirely that is highlighted in the post from the first link in relation to DAGs scoring system.

In short, it’s completely unfair IMO and completely skewed toward single brand repairers, such as OEM service, or service agents that only do a few select brands.

You see you get judged in the DAG system based on the customer surveys, which is fine and dandy if you look for the right answers and take that data in context. Trouble is, way I see is, it’s most often not.

Let me expand a little.

We get calls for MFI products, Diplomat, Hygena etc. which is now a defunct company with more limited access to spares now than there was when they were trading, yes I use and know about AWS but even with that there are still some parts that are, “difficult”. We don’t stock anywhere near what we used to, after all they’re dead brands, who’s going to sit on mountains of stock for appliances that are disappearing… if they’ve any sense at least.

This almost inevitably leads to delays, double calls as we don’t have the stock and the obligatory consumer complaints about that fact.

We get penalised because MFI went bust? How does that work then?

Then we have Servis… repeat as above only add in some completely exorbitant spares pricing to the mix.

With both, tech support… zero.

Then we have the more exoteric brands, you know the Comet exclusive stuff that you can only get bits from Comet for, at stupid prices after weeks of waiting, maybe.

Or Kenwood dishwashers and the likes from Currys. Weird and wonderful brands from Argos, supermarkets and the likes as well all of which we can pretty much repeat the bad points above for.

Getting a parts list can be an issue let alone anything remotely useful, including a spare part.

All these things gives delays, hack consumers off and, lo and behold, drop our scores!!

I don’t mind having the scores dropped if it’s something that we can actually do something about, I get annoyed when we can’t and it’s complaints generated by the brand owners basically due to lack of support and not the repairers.

Which brings me to Haier.

Thankfully we’ve only had a few that I can tell but, no support, one outlet for spares, no trade discount and so far as I can tell the importer is having a total laugh with the pricing. I’m not inclined to pay massively inflated prices for spares and, asides that, it bumps up the average spares cost and the write off rates. That is, of course, if they even have the parts.

Meanwhile, the flipside is that some are getting awards by cherry picking work or just plain cheating the system.

Generally speaking, they’re the companies also running about with a van full of stock to use at a whim and don’t have to go ferreting about multiple suppliers etc. to try to locate oddball parts that most normal trade spares distributors don’t want to know about.

So higher costs, more time spent sourcing parts and all the brands that are likely to cause complaints in the first place.

Now we’ve been asked to try to call from the house with costs! How on Earth can we do that if the engineer in the house has to go and ferret about the net trying to locate spares supplies let alone a part number and price and make multiple calls to do that? It is, in a great many cases, completely unworkable in the real world.

I don’t know about anyone else but, IMO, I’d say that the system is in need of a bit of an overhaul.

I have asked DAG about this on a couple of occasions when some of the more stupid complaints have come through (which they upheld on the part of the customer I hasten to add) but, to date, I have yet to receive any reply let alone any sort of sensible explanation for the way things are.

K.

[Dales-Electronic]

Re: Judged Fairly

I would totally agree – for ages now we have always been in the top 15 of their report at 100{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} but recently because of a group of ‘difficult to source’ ones we’re down to 67{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} this time around. But as you rightly say despite conversations things seem to fall on deaf ears these days.

[Jonah]

Re: Judged Fairly

I’m in exactly the same position as you Ken, have been in the top 15 to 20 for many years but dropped down to about 50 last time round because of the same problems you have, it’s a very unfair system unless you do just one brand 😉

[Lawrence]

Re: Judged Fairly

I agree It definitely seems loaded towards those that do a very small number of brands,I also seem to have a post code conflict with another agent either that or I am only following up where they can’t source part or sort fault…

[Author]

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