Reasonable length of time to repair TV under extended warranty

BrokenTVguy

Bought a Samsung 75” 8K TV from Currys back in Oct 2021. Worked fine until a month or so ago, when screen went multi coloured and it turned off and wouldn’t turn on again. Essentially dead. I have a 5 year Knowhow extended warranty (free with the TV), which expires in Oct 2025.

Currys collected my TV on July 20th and took it back to their workshop to repair it - under the Knowhow extended warranty.

Within the first few days of having it, the update was that they needed to order some parts to complete the repair and that the original 7 day turnaround was not going to be honoured. That was fine. However, fast forward to today. They have had the TV for over 28 days (an amount of time I thought might be significant) and the tracker webpage still says that they are 'working hard to source parts for my repair'. There are no signs that they've made any progress.

I did get Currys to send me a copy of my warranty, which states the following:

In the event of a mechanical breakdown, we will provide a repair service. Your product will be repaired as many times as necessary without charge, up to the cost of the original purchase price paid for the product.
If we can't repair it you will be given a voucher to obtain a replacement product in one of our stores . The value will be based on an equivalent or similar specification product up to a maximum value of the original purchase price.

So I thought it seems like a decent guarantee but I was wary of the lack of timescales listed. I phoned up this morning to see what the next step are. I mentioned that you've had it for a month and not fixed it and i'd like to start the process for obtaining a voucher. However the Currys lady came back and said because this was an extended warranty (as opposed to Care and Repair and any other premium paid service) there was essentially no time limit to how long Currys could keep my TV while attempting to repair it. She stated there was no SLA for an extended warranty - what’s an SLA?

I mentioned my rights under the CRA and that I thought this was not a reasonable amount of time to be without the TV and that I was being inconvenienced but of course she couldn't say much, other than this was policy and she's just delivering the message. I've started a complaint, essentially under an infringement of my consumer rights and that they are breaching the CRA but I guess in the grand scheme of things perhaps 28 days isn't unreasonable. The problem is that the CRA is so vague and 'reasonable amount of time' is so subjective.

Anyway, if anyone has any thoughts or comments?

Cheers!

BrokenTVguy

To clarify I don’t intend to claim under the CRA, I merely mentioned that as it relates to the reasonable amount of time to repair. My query is how long is too long? Doesn’t seem right that they can say ‘we keep it till we fix it’ when my basic rights say the time has to be reasonable.

Chieveley

SLA = Service level agreement. We had a similar problem with a TV under a John Lewis warranty. They had it ages, over Christmas so it was 2 months before before they issued a refund as they couldn't get the parts. Keep pressing but politely. 

BrokenTVguy

Chieveley said:

SLA = Service level agreement. We had a similar problem with a TV under a John Lewis warranty. They had it ages, over Christmas so it was 2 months before before they issued a refund as they couldn't get the parts. Keep pressing but politely

Oh that’s what SLA means - makes sense. Thanks for the advice on this, keeping on it but politely! I’m waiting for their CS team to come back to me as I have complained about the length of time and the open ended nature of the repair time

400ixl

Why start a new thread instead of using the running one? Just adds confusion.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6541188/samsung-tv-faulty-after-3-5-years/

BrokenTVguy

400ixl said:

Why start a new thread instead of using the running one? Just adds confusion.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6541188/samsung-tv-faulty-after-3-5-years/

I started a new one as there was actually quite a lot of info that wasn’t really relevant on the original one. Most of the previous thread was around my rights to a repair - before I realised I had an extended warranty.

As a result this thread is more focused around the length of time for a repair under extended warranty - so different. Apologies if it’s confusing at all.

Okell

BrokenTVguy said:

400ixl said:

Why start a new thread instead of using the running one? Just adds confusion.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6541188/samsung-tv-faulty-after-3-5-years/

I started a new one as there was actually quite a lot of info that wasn’t really relevant on the original one. Most of the previous thread was around my rights to a repair - before I realised I had an extended warranty.

As a result this thread is more focused around the length of time for a repair under extended warranty - so different. Apologies if it’s confusing at all.

If you are getting it repaired under warranty rather than the CRA then what the CRA says is basically irrelevant because you've chosen not to use it.

By all means quote what the CRA says to Currys to try to persuade them that the same guidance should apply but they'd be entitled to say "So what - you haven't claimed under the CRA"

DullGreyGuy

SLAs can be very broad or very prescriptive... some are just general commitments, some are binding parts of a contract. Inevitably if an SLA does exist someone will find a way to game them. 

In my first ever job we had an SLA that 90% of calls had to be answered within 10 seconds. We typically had an average call waiting time of about 5 minutes... you can safely assume it means we were well outside SLA but would actually need more data to say for certain because if those 10% that were over 10 seconds actually were taking days to be answered it could in theory pull up the average wait time.  After a while one of the directors started having an issue with it, someone did some maths and setup an automated message that kicked in after 6 minutes or so saying we were too busy please call back. Suddenly we were inside the SLA. 



Your warranty is much more generous than your statutory rights so its up to you to balance the amount of time its taking to get money against having a shorter wait but receiving much less money as the CRA says they can discount for use and at 3 years old its likely they'll argue you'll get less than 50% of its price back.

Alderbank

Currys' warranty forms part of the T&Cs of the contract of sale and is enforceable in law. You say there is no timeframe mentioned but in a consumer contract there is an implied contract term that the timeframe must be reasonable.

It is hard to define 'reasonable'  because there are so many possible variables. If it is any help (I don't think it is), 'reasonable' is often defined in law as that which a reasonable person would find reasonable having regard to all the circumstances.

Specialist parts for an 8K tv originally made for a small production run 4 years ago might be difficult to get hold of. There are known problems over Samsung's contract with LG for supply of large hi-res panels which might also be a factor.

BrokenTVguy

Thanks for the input. Definitely not going down the CRA (the warranty terms are far better) and will have to be patient. I can’t see them sourcing these parts any time soon though, so hopefully they will acknowledge this in the next few weeks and perhaps I’ll get a voucher at some point in the next month?

DullGreyGuy

BrokenTVguy said:

Thanks for the input. Definitely not going down the CRA (the warranty terms are far better) and will have to be patient. I can’t see them sourcing these parts any time soon though, so hopefully they will acknowledge this in the next few weeks and perhaps I’ll get a voucher at some point in the next month?

Just keep on at them, they were very slow with my prior TV claim, more worryingly ours was stuck at "in transport to the repair facility" for weeks. However when they did eventually decide it was unrepairable it was 24 hours for the vouchers to appear which were the full price paid for the TV. Because of the TV cycle (all new TVs are announced at CES in early Jan) I was able to upgrade to OLED and a 3 year newer TV than my old one plus 50p change