Cheap & Free Warranties Article Discussion

I notice Squaretrade are now offering competitively priced warranties in the UK via Amazon. Has anyone had experience of their service?

Danger_Fourpence wrote: »

I notice Squaretrade are now offering competitively priced warranties in the UK via Amazon. Has anyone had experience of their service?

Id be interested to know about this too.

Because of MSE I decided to put aside what money I would have other wise spent on a warranty into a separate bank account. So now I never buy warranties from shops.
However, this became tiresome and so I create a tool to keep tack of it.

Since I had already created it, I thought I may as well put it on the internet for all to use.

The website is called SelfWarranty.

Have a look and see what you think.
Hopefully you should understand how to use it pretty quickly.

This is a post about some very serious problems I’ve been having with the John Lewis second year warranty for my Toshiba laptop. I would caution any MSE users to think twice before doing any Christmas shopping at John Lewis or Peter Jones!
This is why:
I used to trust John Lewis’ brand name, so much so that I chose to pay them £700 instead of spending £630 for the same laptop from PC World (due to a technicality I was told that couldn’t price-match).
I justified this additional cost because of the extra warranty period (beginning as soon as the manufacturers 12 month warranty ended and lasting a further year). I also thought that I could rely on John Lewis’ reputation for customer service. I was wrong.
A few months into the John Lewis warranty the unit developed several hardware issues. I called the JL technical support number and they explained that I would need to send it off to their repair providers, Regenersis, who were based outside of London. This would take up to 14 days.
I have since discovered that John Lewis have a commercial agreement with this repair company. Despite the fact that any repair work done by a Toshiba-authorised repair partner should be to the same high standard, John Lewis have a commercial incentive to put work through Regenersis only.
I told them that I used my laptop daily, so this would be very inconvenient. The John Lewis employee I spoke to said that there was another option available, at the discretion of the Oxford Street store, which was to use any other Toshiba authorised repair centre instead, including one I had found in Central London called Gultronics. I called the JL store’s PC department and this was confirmed to me. All I needed to do was to pay for the work and get a full invoice and John Lewis would reimburse me in-store afterwards. They knew Gultronics well and were happy for me to use the company.
Gultronics inspected the unit and wrote a repair note listing the hardware issues which would need replacement parts. I paid almost £150 for the parts and the repair charge and they then ordered the parts. Whilst waiting for their delivery, another issue emerged which I confirmed was also a hardware fault with the help of Toshiba’s technical support centre. I noted the reference number for this call and asked them to note full details of the case.
Since another part would need to be ordered, I called the JL Oxford St store to let them know. I was told that the person I had spoken to previously had left the company, no work done via Gultronics would be permitted and that I would have to carry out all further repairs with the repair partner, and that I would have to contact JL head office to find out whether a refund of the £150 I had already paid Gultronics was even possible.
At this point I was livid. This was a totally different policy by the company to the one they had previously taken. I had:
1) Spent a lot of money, in good faith and acting under the advice of two separate employees of John Lewis. I was now not even sure if this reimbursement would be honoured by the firm.
2) Wasted a lot of my time and inconvenienced myself a great deal
3) Still not managed to resolve the issues with my laptop at ongoing inconvenience to myself
4) Been told I would need to waste further time (up to 14 days) in order to repair my machine.
I complained about this – first to the manager of the John Lewis store’s consumer electronics department, Mr. Mark John Pierce, and then to customer services at John Lewis head office (020 7828 1000 – ask for Kiran Shah, if any readers are having similar issues). It was agreed that they would look into both the refund and sorting out a more viable option for the repairs, and that someone would revert in full within 24 hours.
I got a call the next day from a junior in the Oxford St store reiterating their previous position on the repairs. I’ve had no feedback on the refund.
I have since emailed the customer services department asking for a more acceptable response. I believe senior management need to be made aware of the escalation of my complaint, so I CC’d the Chief Executive of John Lewis, Mr. Andy Street, and the Chairman, Mr. Charlie Mayfield. More than three working days later, I’ve had no acknowledgement of my email at all.
To summarise, John Lewis have really let me down and in doing so they have massively damaged their reputation for customer service.
By not allowing me to use an authorised Toshiba repair centre in London, it is my view that they have contravened the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999. In doing so, John Lewis are ignoring what would be a more pragmatic option, given the considerable inconvenience I have already been put to. They are choosing commercial agreements and profits over customer experience.
I will now be pushing for further compensation for the time and funds incurred over the last month as I have tried to resolve this issue. I’d love to hear if anyone else has had a similarly bad experience with John Lewis and how they managed to resolve it.
I’ll update this post with any further developments – in the meantime, I would advise anyone reading this to think twice before doing any Christmas shopping at John Lewis or Peter Jones!