Apr 16, 2017 06:12 AM
25903 Views
I bought a samsung inverter AC in Sept 2014. In about three months or so I started experiencing cooling issues. I called customer service and the technician first diagnosed this as an electrical problem related to the grounding of the outlet. I ran a separate earthing line for the electrical outlet the AC was connected to. However I continued to have the cooling problem. The technician insisted it was the grounding, so I had a second electrician install the grounding again. It still did not resolve the issue - finally it turned out to be the compressor. Net result, I was out of pocket for the work related to the grounding. The compressor was fixed in warranty. Fast forward a year or so, I had cooling issues again. This time the technician diagnosed the problem as the condenser being faulty. The condenser was in warranty however I had to pay for refilling the gas - not a small amount(Rs 2500). Fast forward another 3 months or so, I was having cooling issues again. The technician came over and this time diagnosed the problem as the circuit board being faulty. As I understand it the outdoor unit has only three major components(Condenser, Compressor and Circuit Board) and in about 2 years of operation, all three components failed. At the price point of this unit, this level of performance is downright terrible. My troubles do not end here. The next day another technician(different from the one who made the fault diagnosis as being the circuit board) came to replace the faulty circuit board with the new one. The technician installed the new circuit board, switched on the unit and the new circuit board also failed. I had a problem with this. To me this implied that either the circuit board quality was so terrible that units fail often - I had personally seen two units manufactured at completely different times fail consecutively, or that the service technicians do not know the correct procedure to install or trouble shoot circuit boards. I explained this to samsung customer service and said that I should not have to pay for the circuit board. I explained that I should not have to pay for possibly a bad batch of circuit boards or their service technician's incompetence. However they refused to accept this. When I asked them to annotate the visit of the second technician and the failure of the second new circuit board on the bill for the service, they refused to do so. Net result, I had to pay Rs 10, 000 for the circuit board. So the gist of troubles is some thing like this - samsung customer service would like me to be believe that for some reason I was the terribly unfortunate customer for whom all components of the unit failed within 2 years. This should be rare - like being struck by lightning. Fine, but when a completely new circuit board also fails, asking to me accept it and pay for it is like trying to tell me that I should accept that I was the unfortunate customer that was struck by lightening twice on two consecutive days.
Clearly based on what I read here and other places poor product performance is very common. It is ridiculous that they get away with this kind of product quality and customer service.
