Last Christmas, I received a Haier wine refrigerator as a gift. The refrigerator worked fine for about five months, then stopped functioning. So, I did what I normally do in such cases - I visited their website, in this case,
www.haieramerica.com to troubleshoot the problem.
There was a customer support section on the website but it's not very useful. They provide an email for help - - but despite my sending multiple messages to it, I got no response. Thanks Haier for putting customers last.
So, today, I reached out to the Haier America call center, where I spoke with a fine gentleman named Steve. Steve was not very much help. He took quite a bit of information from me, then asked me to send in a copy of my purchase receipt. As mentioned at the top of this post, I received this as a gift this past holiday season and did not get a gift receipt. By the manufacturing date on the back of the item, Steve was able to confirm that the refrigerator was clearly still under warranty. However, Steve was not very much use after finding out I had no receipt. All he could do was suggest that I call Haier's main corporate number (which is closed today being Saturday). In fact, Steve wouldn't even tell me his last name and couldn't provide me with a contact at Haier corporate.. He is at extension 6985 if anyone wants to chat with him.
So, what does all this have to do with content and technology and why am I posting it to this blog? I guess there are some tangentially related points, that of a weak website, ignoring emails and overall poor customer service. But mainly, I'm just posting it so that anyone thinking of buying a Haier item as a gift might reconsider. If you don't provide a gift receipt, the recipient will be out of luck if they have a problem. Even if you do offer the gift receipt, should they not keep that for the full warranty period, they're out of luck.
Any good marketer will monitor customer sentiment in the blogosphere. I'm sure that Richard Block, VP of Marketing at Haier America, must do so. I'm also pretty sure that the cost of many people reading this post and deciding not to purchase Haier products will be much higher than the cost of providing decent customer service to me would have been. But, as I click the save button here, that opportunity is now gone.
For more information about consumers who are dissatisfied with Haier products, you might want to visit this consumer affairs website.
UPDATE (July 31, 2008): The Monday after I posted this, roughly a month after sending my original emails, I got an email response from Daisy at Haier America. Three weeks and a bunch of emails back and forth and I finally got a replacement unit from Haier. So, do I feel any differently about their customer service now than when I wrote the post? No. It's pretty evident to me that had I not had this forum to voice this problem, they would have never responded to me. It's only through the miracle of Google that they found me important enough to resolve the problem. And now, when I look at my web analytics, I see that each day I get roughly 2-5 clicks from people searching for Haier customer service or Haier consumer reports or similar. So, chalk one up for social media - for months and probably years to come, Haier's reputation will be impacted by the poor customer service they provided.
