I have formed this opinion after my latest experience with Nokia phone and their customer service. Before this experience I had been a great fan of Nokia for over a decade . I have owned one of the first models (5110) they launched in India back in 1998. Call rates then were as high as Rs 9/- per minute for out going and Rs 6/- per minute for incoming on BPL Mobile, Mumbai. Over the years I bought and owned several other Nokia models like 3130, 3610, N72 etc and had a pleasant experience with all of them.
My latest phone is a Nokia e61i. I was gifted this phone by wifey last Diwali. We bought this phone from Croma @ Hadapsar. It was working fine until sometime last month when I noticed its keypad back-light was not working even in a dark room. I know e61i has a "light sensitive" back-light and it would light up only when needed.
Not sure when and how did it stop working as I do not use phones in the dark very often. Anyways since, phone was still under warranty I thought it prudent to show it to a NokiaCare. I took the phone to Akshay Telecom on F C Road. They examined the phone and said it was due to water seepage and will not be done under warranty. I was shocked. The phone was never ever mishandled, dropped or drenched in my possession and is working absolutely fine otherwise. Probably it is just a manufacturing defect which I failed to notice sooner. As a pricey gift and some emotional attachment to it, I agreed to bear the cost of repairing and left the phone with them. They promised to come back to me in three to four days.
Days passed but they never called back or bothered to answer my phone calls. In between I made four visits to their center- always crowded and people huddling to get an attention from dorky attendants. The volume of crowd tells the quality of phones that Nokia is churning out these days. Every time I went I had to wait for at least half an hour to get my turn. They would say they are still "looking into" it. Fed up with their unprofessional ways and after so many days without my primary phone, at last, I decided to take back the phone. They returned it un-repaired still they billed me Rs 112/- as "testing charges". After this, I followed up with couple of emails and calls to NokiaCare directly. None of these helped. They just defended the action of their care center instead of advising me how to get the issue resolved.
My phone remains un-repaired, working w/o back-light. NokiaCare says it will not be fixed under warranty or otherwise as it is "water-logged". They know, after so many months it is difficult for me to prove that I am not responsible for "water-logging" or whatever and it is a genuine manufacturing defect. It does not hurt them. It hurts me. For no fault of mine I would have to live with an ailing phone for which I spent my hard earned 17k. It hurts more when it is from such a reliable and a big brand like Nokia.
I do not know why Nokia has such a ridiculous warranty and customer support policy in India! When the hard-disk on my four years old PC conked off Seagate immediately replaced it with a new one without asking any question.
Nokia are you listening?
You have just lost a loyal customer. I am not surprised by your concerns of loosing market share !
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