A reader called Debbie contacted us in a bit of a state, saying she has been given the runaround by Currys, where she bought an oven late last year.
Last November she bought a Hisense fan oven on the Currys website and had it delivered a few weeks later but still in plenty of time for Christmas.
Christmas Day went swimmingly but Easter Sunday did not, and that was the day the fan in her oven stopped working.
She waited until the following Tuesday – the first working day after the long weekend – and contacted Currys.
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She sent us a sample of the correspondence she received from the company.
“Thank you for your email,” one message began. “First of all, I would like to apologise for the delay with my response. My name is *** and I am from Currys Republic of Ireland Customer Services. After reviewing the details, we found that the item is currently outside of our returns policy, but it is still within the guarantee period. I apologise, but we are unable to book a repair via email as we are not technically trained.” For assistance with this matter, please call our repair team on 0818-440001 at your earliest convenience. Your purchase details and appliance serial number will be required, so please ensure that you have this information to hand when you call. Thank you for contacting Currys Republic of Ireland Customer Services. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you need any additional support.”
Debbie says that after “a lot more emails and phone calls, we still didn’t get any help. Basically we were told to contact Hisense ourselves and that they couldn’t help. Currys didn’t even give us a contact number or reference for Hisense.”
She says it took her nearly a week “but we finally found the right Hisense phone number and email so we thought, Great. But It’s now nearly three weeks later I think and Hisense repair still hasn’t arrived.”
She points out that she has been waiting almost six weeks and still has no working oven. “Our heads are wrecked from emailing and phoning and getting absolutely nowhere,” she says.
It appears as if Currys is side-stepping its own responsibilities by asking her to make contact with the manufacturer to have the problem addressed.
Under Irish consumer law, Debbie’s contract is with Currys and not with the maker of the oven, and while she is perfectly within her rights to contact the manufacturer, she cannot be made do so by the retailer.
We sent details of her query to Currys to see what it had to say, and we received the following statement: “We sincerely apologise to the customer for the frustration and inconvenience caused by the delays she experienced in arranging a repair for her oven. Although the appliance is still within its manufacturer guarantee period, we recognise that the service she received fell short of the standard we expect. Our team is now in direct contact with the customer and is working through the available options to reach a fair resolution as quickly as possible. We are also reviewing what happened internally to ensure the issues raised are properly addressed and do not happen again.”
