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I've spoken to them (AO) this morning. It's just a really crap customer experience. It took about half an hour. I'm used to just getting replacements if things are broken (I guess due to Amazon), not having to constantly deal with people skipping responsibility. Trying to have a conversation about who's responsible for my case is incendiary because I don't care!
Instead I've had to be in a three way conference call with someone from AO and Beko, and when they started talking about "If this repair doesn't work, we'll get another engineer out to you to diagnose as soon as we can" had to tell them that I wasn't interested in that because "I know my consumer rights (thanks @Hefty) and that they've only got one go at repairing it"; I've never had to resort to that in my life.
They're inevitably going to end up replacing it because they sold it broken and have misdiagnosed the fault. It's just a load of timewasting, pointless faff, BS and loss goodwill up until that point.
christianSpaceman-
Depends what the item is, something simple like an egg timer or a felt tip pen, yeah easy to return/replace as theres not much you can do with it.
Appliances have their own bit of consumer law (usually helps consumers TBF) however this interval period between 4-5 weeks is where it goes from 'really sorry about that, heres another one fitted and replaced FOC ASAP' to 'well we'll schedule an engineer and see what they say, but chances are there is no spare parts available so you'll just have to keep the faulty appliance until we can get the £10 part to fix it, in the mean time we'll just keep you going in circles' -
That's weird and annoying, I had an excellent experience with AO earlier this year when our dishwasher stopped working.
It was outside the warranty period by a couple of months and they replaced it anyway, and also wrote off the difference between the rubbish dishwasher and the Bosch replacement.
I was massively impressed at the time - maybe they changed their policy when their supervisor found out how much being nice cost them.
BrickMan
tbc
Have family who live remote, zanussi machine from late 80's 90's finally died and part no longer in production for near 20 years so was impossible to repair.
Bought a new bosch average model, maybe £500 from AO. Paid extra for the long distance delivery and fitting and removal of old machine, all normal costs and nothing alarming.
Day 2 machine broke, no signs of life, nothing else on the circuit affected.
Took a month until AO were in the area again to replace. Replaced with new machine, lasted maybe 2 or 3 weeks until same again. But took them a month to collect so then dropped into 'we'll attempt a repair'.
Was maybe 4 months without a washing machine last year due to it. In the end turned out there was a whole batch of bosch machines with a faulty control board that AO had a large amount of so they were just changing one bad board for another several times over.
Got a Beko or another zAnussi (not Japanese production) and its been fine for a year now on same power supply. Had an electrician out who left a machine on it for a week to check for voltage surges incase that was causing it, nope.