A question of good customer service

Even though it has been almost 11 months since I purchased my O2 XDA IIi PDA phone from Harvey Norman (Ikano Power Centre), the bad customer service and after sales service still leaves a bitter memory.

What rekindle this bad memory was a friend of mine who had intended to buy an electrical appliance from Harvey Norman and he asked me for my opinion on Harvey Norman. And guess what was my reply? A rhetoric of what bad customer service I endured from Harvey Norman.

To recap the incident, my purchase was a defective product (dead pixel on the screen). This was forgiveable as I did not expect the staff of HN to check every item they received from the distributor. But what was annoying was the staff and 'so-called' manager in charge of the PDA section. They received the defective PDA and said they will let me know when the PDA will be rectified. No problem with that, but then no reply from them for almost 3 weeks and I had to go to HN to find out the status of the repair.

I made an appointment with the sales staff that sold the PDA to me. Guess what? the staff was on leave and the 'so-called' manager did not even know of my appointment. I asked if he was the manager in charge and he replied he was. Sales staff missing and manager in the dark. Asked him to check his returned merchandise list to find out the status of my PDA. I don't think he even knew where the list was kept and obviously not an idea of my PDA's status. Man, was I really irritated by then. Imagine a new PDA purchase but for almost one month, no PDA.

Normally, I don't blow my top that too often (especially in public) but in this case, I got pretty angry and annoyed and lodged an official complaint on this to HN. Bur to my surprise, HN has no complaint form. All the counter staff could do was an empty piece of paper. Even an empty piece of paper will do, so I wrote my complaint and sealed it in an envelope handed to the sales counter staff.

But this is not the end of the incident, to date I have not received any acknowledgement from the management of Harvey Norman. That's right up to today!!!

I did eventually received my repaired PDA a couple of days later. But since that incident, I have not step into Harvey Norman. And my advice to all: DON'T PATRONIZE HARVEY NORMAN.