An Irate Indian Customer of a Chinese Product

I bought a Haier Air conditioner, a Chinese make about a year back. It was cooling my bedroom to some extent, which I thought was the maximum possible by an A/C in the hot climate of Delhi.

When the warranty period was about to get completed, (Thank God it happened on time) my wife found that it is not going below a certain temperature. Then I lodged a complaint with the Haier, who assured me that the complaint would be attended to within 24 hours. 24 hours, but then I never thought that 24 hours was going to be such a long one. It took three 24 hours and no one seemed to attend to my problem. Whenever I called the call centre, they would verify all the details and ask me “Sir Has no one still attended to your complaint?” I became the information provider to them. They would set a reminder to the concerned department and see that the service personnel attended to my problem in 24 hours. Another three such 24 hours went and by now I was working better than that call centre executives in replaying the same old messages. Then I had to go to the dealer from whom I purchased this A/C. The person there took this on priority and tried to get it resolved. It took another 3 days for them to find out a solution. We, on the other hand sent a mail to Haier about their service and to my surprise I did not even receive an automatic reply from their end. My attempts to get through the team leader and the manager of the call centre did not materialize as they were in meeting always (Probably to find out a solution on how to dodge the customers).

At last after more than 10 days someone dropped in and serviced my A/C and it looked that I could get it done finally.

But , my happiness was short lived (less than a week) and one fine day when I switched on the A/C there was a spark on it and the electric supply to my whole home went off. Not to mention that, the AC stopped working. I called the electrician of my society to find out that there are full of loose connections in the wiring between the stabilizer and AC, which was done during the so called Service by the Haier’s authorized service personnel.

Now again the same story, get a complaint number from the call centre and this time they gave a contact for the service provider, who in turn advised us to get in touch with another. The third person contacted again directed us to another person, who is supposed and will send somebody who could fix my problem.

During my first call he told me that he will arrange someone to get my A/c fixed on that day itself, but after that I am not able to reach him as he doesn’t answer the phones and I cannot reach any of the persons above except the call centre. The call centre has the same answer ‘They will set a reminder and see that someone attends the problem in 24 hours’. And I am still counting my 24 hours and having sleepless nights in this cool summer of Delhi...