MyADSL did not feel they could post this column I wrote as it is not a newspiece, but a lot of people have told me it is worth reading... so here it is...
The country is facing a cellphone repair crises. I stumbled upon this fact when my wife’s Nokia needed a software upgrade. So I decided to take it to the Exactmobile Phones Nokia Repair Centre in Woodmead Johannesburg. When I got there, I found it has closed down,
At this point alarm bells started ringing because I knew Exactmobile Phones handled most of the Nokia repairs in the country, so I phoned Exactmobile to find out what was going on.
A contact at the company said Exactmobile Phones was closed after the Nokia’s policy on paying out for warranty repairs changed and it was no longer a viable business. A lot of the staff had apparently been absorbed into Vodacom. When I asked what I should do then, they suggested I take it to a network store, which I did.
This proved to be a disaster. The MTN Service Centre at Northgate, Johannesburg told me they had a five week turnaround time on repairs. Who can wait five weeks for their phone to be repaired? So I asked what my alternatives were, and they told me to go to Ixia, a repair company in Midrand.
(Now I’ve had dealings with Ixia before (http://www.mybroadband.co.za/nephp/?m=show&id=3615; http://www.mybroadband.co.za/nephp/?m=show&id=3626 and last time I had my Samsung repaired through them, they returned it to broken. On that occasion I contacted Samsung directly and they were brilliant in their service, replacing my broken phone with a brand new phone which was an upgrade on what I had.)
Added to that, a good friend’s Nokia had been sent twice to Ixia as it was rebooting itself. They had it for weeks and in the end never fixed the problem.
With my previous experience with Ixia and the experience of my friend, I phoned Nokia’s communications manager.
As was the case with Samsung, Nokia jumped on my query (perhaps because I am a journalist?) and within a day my wife’s phone was repaired and delivered to my door and my friend received a brand new phone courtesy of Nokia. Problem solved.
I heard from Nokia that they are addressing the shortage by assisting another repair company to get its feet off the ground as they are only serviced by Ixia and another company. However, it will apparently take a couple of months to train the staff and get them up to speed on how to repair Nokia phone. In the meantime, the other companies are sweating trying to pick up the slack as Exactmobile Phones was repairing around 40 000 Nokias a month country wide.
The moral of the story. Complain and be loud about it. I can’t fault the handset providers in this case. They have always been amazing in sorting my repair problems out. Perhaps if more people complained to them then the service they received, the repair problem would be sorted out faster?
The country is facing a cellphone repair crises. I stumbled upon this fact when my wife’s Nokia needed a software upgrade. So I decided to take it to the Exactmobile Phones Nokia Repair Centre in Woodmead Johannesburg. When I got there, I found it has closed down,
At this point alarm bells started ringing because I knew Exactmobile Phones handled most of the Nokia repairs in the country, so I phoned Exactmobile to find out what was going on.
A contact at the company said Exactmobile Phones was closed after the Nokia’s policy on paying out for warranty repairs changed and it was no longer a viable business. A lot of the staff had apparently been absorbed into Vodacom. When I asked what I should do then, they suggested I take it to a network store, which I did.
This proved to be a disaster. The MTN Service Centre at Northgate, Johannesburg told me they had a five week turnaround time on repairs. Who can wait five weeks for their phone to be repaired? So I asked what my alternatives were, and they told me to go to Ixia, a repair company in Midrand.
(Now I’ve had dealings with Ixia before (http://www.mybroadband.co.za/nephp/?m=show&id=3615; http://www.mybroadband.co.za/nephp/?m=show&id=3626 and last time I had my Samsung repaired through them, they returned it to broken. On that occasion I contacted Samsung directly and they were brilliant in their service, replacing my broken phone with a brand new phone which was an upgrade on what I had.)
Added to that, a good friend’s Nokia had been sent twice to Ixia as it was rebooting itself. They had it for weeks and in the end never fixed the problem.
With my previous experience with Ixia and the experience of my friend, I phoned Nokia’s communications manager.
As was the case with Samsung, Nokia jumped on my query (perhaps because I am a journalist?) and within a day my wife’s phone was repaired and delivered to my door and my friend received a brand new phone courtesy of Nokia. Problem solved.
I heard from Nokia that they are addressing the shortage by assisting another repair company to get its feet off the ground as they are only serviced by Ixia and another company. However, it will apparently take a couple of months to train the staff and get them up to speed on how to repair Nokia phone. In the meantime, the other companies are sweating trying to pick up the slack as Exactmobile Phones was repairing around 40 000 Nokias a month country wide.
The moral of the story. Complain and be loud about it. I can’t fault the handset providers in this case. They have always been amazing in sorting my repair problems out. Perhaps if more people complained to them then the service they received, the repair problem would be sorted out faster?
