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Carphone kerfuffle

A reader from Castlebar got in touch following a dispute with the Carphone Warehouse over phone insurance. In 2005, he bought a Samsung phone from the Carphone Warehouse and was convinced to take out insurance at a cost of €8.99 a month. He was very pleased with his purchase, and had no problems with it until last May when it got wet and shut itself down permanently.

He brought it to his nearest Carphone Warehouse branch - in Galway - hoping to claim a new phone under his insurance policy. He was told the phone would have to be sent away to see if it could be repaired first, a process that would take a week.

Our reader was also offered a standby phone for a €35 deposit. Three weeks later he had heard nothing from Carphone Warehouse so phoned the branch and was told his phone would be back the following week. "Two weeks later, I phoned again and was told that the phone was due in at the end of the week." Three more weeks passed before he received a phone call saying his phone had come in. "As I live in Castlebar, I was not able to come to Galway until the following weekend." When he got there, "the shop assistant told me that there was some problem, and that he had to speak to head office about it before he could give me anything. He said that everything would be sorted out first thing on Monday morning. So I had come from Castlebar to Galway for nothing."

Two weeks later he went back to the shop and was told that head office had not got back to them yet about the phone. Eventually he was told his Samsung was to be replaced with a different, inferior brand of phone.

"When I returned the standby Nokia phone and charger, I asked for the €35 deposit back. The assistant then had to explain to me that there was an excess charge involved, and that I had to pay this to receive my new phone (which was not the phone I wanted). How much was this charge? Exactly €35. I fail to understand how €8.99 a month paid towards insurance for the past 23 months (€206.77) could not cover the cost of a phone selling for €48 with €40 free call credit. One month's insurance payment is clearly higher than the value of that phone, let alone 23."

We contacted Carphone Warehouse and a spokeswoman admitted that it had let down our reader on this occasion. She said that some of the delays he experienced were outside of the store's control and added that he had not been provided with a Samsung replacement handset as none that matched the specifications of his phone were available through his provider at that time. She said that the excess of €35 was clearly stated in the terms and conditions and pointed out that some 90 per cent of all insurance claims made to Carphone Warehouse were done in-store and quickly. She accepted that the delays our reader experienced were completely unacceptable and said that as a gesture of goodwill and by way of apology the store was going to give him an up-to-date Samsung phone and a headset.

She also said that our reader's experience had prompted the company to reassess its customer charter to see what improvements it could make to ensure incidents such as this don't occur in the future.