Public Help ?

[Kirk]

I have tried to find out how much discussion went into how much help we give our customers on the net?

We cant give them to much incase they kill themselves but we can still tell them to take the back of say a Blomberg and explain where the pressure bottle is! above the heater! so okay they are told to switch of at the mains does that cover us if what ever reason it isn’t.

I know when they come in my shop I am just as helpfull ! but how many actually listen to what we say so am I liable if they injure themselves?
We sell them a part and they blow it you have a notice up saying unless fitted by trained engineer not guaranteed they all claim that the person fitted it was.

The other point is we tell them how to do a simple job and do ourselves out of quick easy job and send our engineers to do the rest, knowing they will come back to us! if we have no call out CHARGE that I won’t do.

We spend years learning all of this to just give it away,thats why I will not go down the no call out route.

Kirk

[Penguin45]

Kirk,
It’s all a bit of a moot point, really. The great majority of these enquiries end up with “Get an engineer” as the lack of any technical expertise is revealed. Relatively few get down to a detailed fix, and bear in mind that if they’re asking in here they’re probably not prepared to pay anyway. With a bit of luck UKW will make a few bob from a spares sale on some of these – but it’s the same problem as when you sell a spare in your shop – you’ve lost the real money, so MAKE THEM PAY!

Regards,
Chris.

[kwatt]

Re: Public Help ?

Yep, you can only go so far in giving advice out and you reach a point with most these days, telling the customer that they would really need to get an engineer. The trick is to be nice and make sure it’s one of us that they look at for the service. 😉

With modern machines it is getting harder for the DIY repairers out there although there are many that will still have a go I’m sure, but like the cowboys they’re being forced to get someone that actually does know what they’re doing. Hence I don’t mind the free call brigade as if they want to tear about the countryside getting a bad name for themselves that’s fine, I only take exception when they start slagging decent product just because they don’t have a clue about it. That said, customers that do buy something half ways reasonable aren’t stupid and it doesn’t take them long to suss when the engineer is guessing and they now have a great tool to find out if the diagnosis is correct or not, the internet. In many cases, that customer will end up here, on UK Whitegoods these days.

Penguin is quite correct, once the customer calls up A.N. Other for service or wants to buy a spare part then the call is lost to the “authorised” agent, all you can do is try to help the customer and hopefully with the lesson learnt they won’t make the same mistake again. I used to get really worked up about this as a Zanussi agent in particular just because there were so many out there without a clue trying to repair machines that they hadn’t the first idea about, I gave up worrying about such things long ago. If the customer calls in someone that rips them off, be it on purpose os simply due to lack of product knowledge, then so be it, they’ll know better the next time I hope and will have hopefully learnt that maybe the callout charge that they face wasn’t so expensive after all.

K.

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