I bought a Gear S3 Frontier in July here in the UK. It has worked great until last Thursday when the battery drained fully in 6 hours. Now it won't charge past 94% and the battery won't last more than 6 hours. Granted it has rarely ever charged to 100% but I considered that a quirk of the watch or software. I was never bothered since the watch easily lasted 48 hours on a charge. 6 hours of charge makes the watch unusable in a normal day.
I contacted Samsung support - all seemed well until they took my details and serial number. They said, "your watch is not an EU watch, we cannot help you. Here is a link to our policies, goodbye." What? I bought a Samsung watch in London and it does not work in London. It only makes sense, from a customer perspective, that this would be fixed in London where I live and work. After several hours of online chat, phone calls, emails I was bounced around the world. Here are the locations I visited online:
- China: they do not have an English language site. I made it nowhere.
- Irish call centre: They girl on the phone happened to read Mandarin so she looked at the Chinese site and gladly gave me a Chinese phone number. What am I meant to do with that?
- Malaysia: They speak English so this gives me hope. They realise that nope, my watch is not Chinese nor Malaysian. It is from UAE. Fine at least they speak English too.
- UAE: They say that my watch is in fact from UAE. So they can fix it. Just need to walk it into a service centre there, no option to post it to them. WHAT?
So, Samsung provide no way to fix a Samsung product in the country where I bought the product and I am residing. They have sent me various links to policies and procedures. Fine, I understand this is your policy, but what are you telling your end users? You do not care. You will not help, because, policy.
Now I have a £280 bracelet. What good is that to me?
In a scenario that would be considered good customer experience it could go like this:
- On the first contact to support in the country I live in, in my native language, the agent would realise that even though I bought my product in the UK it happens to be from another country.
- They take the details.
- They arrange a pick up of the product.
- Samsung receives the product.
- Samsung determines if there are any parts required from the other region and orders them.
- Samsung fixes my product and returns it to me.
That is ideal service from a company as large as Samsung with products as expensive as they are.
A less ideal alternative is to still take my product and repair it for me. Charge me for the repair while quoting regional warranties. I'd be unhappy with the policy but happy my product works. That isn't even an option though.
So do I spent £800 on a flight to Dubai to repair a £280 watch or just trash it and never consider Samsung an option again?
I already know the answer.
