My girlfriend's mom has a Nokia phone. Actually, including the parents and daughters, Nokia sold four phones to the family. Anyway, my GF's mom's phone dies, and it is a couple of days within the warranty period, so she calls up Nokia and inquires about a replacement. They say to send in her phone, and they will send her a replacement in 1 to 3 weeks. She says that 2 or 3 weeks seems rather long, she is on a lot of committees and needs to be available before that long. (This woman is a saint, she is a grade school teacher, and volunteers for dozens of committees, including being on the Board of Directors at the local homeless shelter. Every Christmas morning, she has the entire family volunteer to serve breakfast at the shelter before coming home and opening presents.) Anyway, Nokia says they will see if they can do something to expedite the process and will get back to her. So they dink around a couple of days until the warranty expires, and she has to call back and ask about it, and now they refuse to provide a replacement because of the warranty expiration.

This is utter ********. She reported the problem while the warranty was in service. She did not refuse the offer for a new phone, she accepted their word when they would look into whether or not they could expedite the service. What kind of company is Nokia, anyway? This is bushleague. Their family bought four higher-end Nokia phones in one day, and I have an Internet Tablet that I bought the day it became available for sale to the public. It is utterly stupid to piss off good customers like this. Can any Nokia people on here recommend an avenue of recourse we can take?

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Fred

Course of action: I don't know exactly what they're called in the US but try contacting your local trading standards body and explain your problem to them. Remember to provide all the dates and times you contacted Nokia, what their response was, when the warranty was supposed to expire, all the receipts etc.

If a company trades badly, the local trading standards people should have power to intervene.


As I keep saying in other posts, the problem seems to be with Nokia's US customer service rather than the company as a whole. In fact quite a lot of companies seem to have their poorest customer service in the US, I've no idea why.

Nokia's European customer service is excellent, you can just drop the phone off at your nearest designated repair shop and Nokia will foot the bill. I had a phone repaired a few weeks ago, it took just four days, with no cost to me at all.

Doesn't work that way in the US if a company doesn't follow their warranty all you can do is take them to court and then your just waisting your time it would cost you more money. You can complain to the BBB but they just keep records of what companys have complaints against them. They can't make them honor the warranty

You don't have any kind of trading standards bodies that can take direct action?

No wonder US customer service is so poor if trading law enforcement there is so lax.

There is no Trading Low Enforcement. Now if a company is frauding people that is a differant story but something like this wouldn't count.

As far as I know, in Britain if a company promised a particular guarantee period and failed to live up to that promise, it would be a trading standards matter which could result in fines.

Andrew is right. The consumer in the US is not protected well at all. Laws tend to favor corporations, and it's getting worse that way.

I love the new book The Appeal it about an Appeal Judge getting replaced by a company to get off on paying a huge settlement. It only took the company 10 million on the persons campain(send it secrect ways) to buy them a judge and get off on a 40 million dollar settlement.

Shocking, totally shocking. Surely it's fundamental to a properly competitive market that people know they will get what they paid for? It's not just consumers either, businesses make purchases too.

As I said before, that difference in legal protection would totally explain why Nokia's customer service is so much worse in the US than in Europe.

It's perhaps nothing to do with cost, and entirely to do with legal requirements being more consumer-friendly in the EU.

But doesn't it seem you guys pay more for you electronics I'm not taking about just the exchange rate someone was selling an N810 over on that side of the pond and they wanted more for it in US money then it cost brand new here.