Nokia Conversing About U.S. Service Issues
One of the main reasons that the Nokia Conversations site was setup by longtime Nokia blogger Charlie Schick is to better facilitate….conversations….between Nokia and its consumers. When it first launched, a blogger named Amy Gahran posted the same type stuff I’ve been ranting about for a while – if Nokia wants to make a bigger impact in the U.S. market, they’re going to have to step it up in terms of service.
Amy lined up six main things that Nokia needs to address, and Charlie has done exactly what he’s said he’d do with his new site – got in touch with the people who make things move in the right departments, and got some answers. Here’s her six things:
1. Don’t blame your intermediaries
2. Price and sell your product reasonably
3. Speed repair turnaround time and enhance your warranty
4. Frankly and publicly discuss your known firmware update problems
5. Fix your firmware update process
6. Expand US local retail availability and service
Charlie’s come back to the scene with updates for 3, 4, and 5, and will be laying those out on the Conversations site. He started with #3, chatting with those involved, and James came back with this response from the Nokia USA team. The team notes that while the site claims up to 30 days, 85% of their returns happen within 7 days, and most are returned within 10 full days.
While that’s great, I can’t help but think that if Nokia USA is going to play ball with unlocked Nseries handsets, they’re going to have to tighten that up a bit. I can call AT&T today, go through some diagnostics and troubleshooting over the phone, and have a replacement unit on my desk tomorrow, in most cases. They trust me enough to ship a replacement and *then* allow me to return my defective handset. Why’s that important? It eliminates the time that I’m left without a phone as best as possible.
What are your thoughts on the current situation of Nokia USA warranty repairs? Have you had any experiences? Don’t leave a comment on this post – channel your feedback to the Conversations site.
Hi, Ricky
Just wanted to say thanks for also raising this issue with Nokia. I did comment on the neww post about service, to clarify that they’re not saying anything new here and to ask for a straight answer on whether they can or will enhance turnaround time and guarantee it to all their N-series customers.
While its nice that they return 85% of their phones in 7-10 days (if that’s true), their main competition for the high-end US phone market (namely Apple) does WAY better than that already. So yes, they should tighten up on the service turnaround time and be willing to guarantee it if they want to be competitive in the US.
We’ll see what happens…
- Amy Gahran
Ricky,
Thanks for being persistent with Nokia about US Service. There is a thread at HoFo (http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1322819&page=1&pp=15) that has each and every correspondence between Nokia and I about my N95-3 repair issue. I think if Nokia reads it they will understand what we’re going through. I also pasted my notes to corporate in this thread. My user name is “hardballer”.
Enjoy!
[...] Nokia Conversing About U.S. Service Issues “I can call AT&T today, go through some diagnostics and troubleshooting over the phone, and have a replacement unit on my desk tomorrow, in most cases. They trust me enough to ship a replacement and *then* allow me to return my defective handset.” (tags: Nokia service business problems) [...]
Gosh. We really need to get Nokia Care more involved in this discussion. I feel that we at Conversations have gone as far as we can. Unless we get some real Care folks involved, I feel like Conversations is just a bunch of hot air.
Eh, that’s obviously not what I want.
–
Charlie, Nokia Conversations
(hm, where did I put my cattle prod?)