Globular Brands.

A tale of customer service in which, somewhere along the journey, I discover that one global brand isn’t very global at all.

It’s a small world after all.

The world has shrunk. Cheap air travel, instant communication, and the globalisation of brands and businesses have made it a smaller, more homogeneous place.

I'm a bit of a global villager, myself; born in England, I moved halfway round the planet to Australia.  And I've lived and worked in China and South East Asia for over a decade, making ads for mainly multinational companies and their international brands.

So it was nothing exceptional when last year, while working on a project in China, my wife and I bought a Samsung Galaxy S5 phone in Hong Kong. In fact, she liked it so much we bought two – one for her and another for our son.

 

Project complete, we moved back to Australia. Both phones worked perfectly here in Australia until a couple of weeks before Christmas, when my wife’s phone suddenly stopped receiving or making calls.

Hold the phone.

Now if you’re married, you’ll know that in a situation like this, it’s your responsibility, if not actually your fault.

Never mind that she chose it. You bought it - you fix it.

We checked out the obvious problem areas: checked the settings, re-booted it. Nothing.

Then we checked the sim. Hers worked in my iPhone; my sim in her phone failed. We had a diagnosis: the problem was with the phone, not the network. 

It was late in the day, so I used the Samsung Customer Service chat line to work through a series of troubleshooting steps, ending up with a ‘restore factory settings’ full system re-boot. It took a while to back up her data and re-set the phone. Still nothing.

Out of the blue.

Next morning I contacted the Samsung Customer Service Centre to make arrangements to take it in, to be checked and repaired.

That’s when they told me I couldn’t.

So much for the warm welcome and the helping hand.

Samsung Australia does not provide any service for overseas models.  Zip, nada, zilch.  Won't even look at it, so don't bother bringing it in.

I was a bit surprised by this.  “But it’s a Samsung! And you are Samsung!”

“Yes,” she said, “but we are Samsung Australia. Your phone is not one of ours.”

This conversation hadn't started well. It didn’t get any better.  "Take it back to Hong Kong." was the Service Centre's next advice.  Hardly the most practical suggestion, I thought. Not terribly sympathetic, either.

After a bit of pushing, I was put through to the Technical Service department. Their technical person also told me they could do nothing.  Then he came up with an idea: “Contact Samsung Hong Kong to see if they have a service provider here.”

That actually sounded like a reasonable suggestion. So I googled ‘Samsung Hong Kong Customer Service’ and got the contact details. Here we go, I thought. Problem solved. I'll just use the repair shop they use ...

I should have known.

Because of the time difference, it was three hours later when the Samsung Hong Kong Customer Service Hotline eventually opened for business.

Wait, what?

Yes, I know. Just savour that for a moment - online customer service that only operates during local office hours, from a global company that specialises in communications technology.

Who knew Koreans had such a wicked sense of humour?

Anyway, once they’d unbolted their virtual door, and flipped the virtual sign to 'Open', I asked them: “Where can I get my Hong Kong Samsung phone repaired in Australia? Who do you use?”

Without a moment's hesitation, they directed me to the Samsung Australia Customer Service Centre.

You got it.  They sent me right back to the very same place that had told me to contact Hong Kong. 

Thanks for that. You’ve been a big help.

Please, Mr Postman ...

So back I went to the Samsung Australia Customer Service website.   And then I saw something I hadn’t noticed before.

‘Email the CEO (Australia)’.

Wow!  Now here’s a company that takes its customer feedback seriously, I thought. You can go straight to the top to get your problem fixed by the boss himself (or possibly herself - the gender of the head honcho not being specified).

So I duly emailed the CEO with an outline of the difficulty I was having.

The reply came back from someone who shall remain nameless, but who signed himself as the ‘CEO Email/RS & DSM Support’.  

Now that may be a very important job, but it’s not quite the ‘CEO (Australia)’ that I was led to believe I would be corresponding with.

Here’s what he said:

“Thanks for contacting Samsung Electronics.

We apologise for the inconvenience caused due to your Samsung mobile phone. Unfortunately the phones bought overseas do not have any warranty in Australia reason being that the hardware and the software on the phone bought in Australia are different to the ones sold overseas and our technicians are not trained to repair them. Thanks”

I knew all that already. And I'd made it clear I wasn’t asking for service under the warranty. I was simply trying to get my Samsung phone repaired by Samsung, and was quite happy to pay for the privilege.

By now it was becoming very clear they weren’t at all interested in me.

Or my phone. Or my money. Or 'owning the customer's problem' (as it says in all the best training manuals). Or God forbid, actually solving it.  Or even decent grammar.

Act local.

So I turned back to Google to search ‘overseas handset repairs’. I found a shop about 5 km away from home and took it in.

And that's how, in a very roundabout way, I actually did take the phone back to Hong Kong after all. 

The guy behind the counter was Chinese.  It turns out he was from Shenzhen.  Close enough.  Even better in fact, as Shenzhen is the home of the Chinese mobile phone industry.

He fixed it the same day. 

What did I learn from all this?

1. Some global brands are only ‘globular’.

I thought Samsung was a global brand from a global company. I was wrong.

Samsung is a lot of individual national trading companies masquerading as a global entity; lots of little globules pretending to be one large one.

Sadly, none of them seems to care about any of the others, even though they all share the same name. The name may be global but the attitude is entirely parochial.

Head Office may labour under the illusion that they are truly global: “We have one logo and one slogan everywhere. Look, all the little pins in our map of the world are the same colour!"

And that's true, up to a point.  The logo on my wife's phone is exactly the same as the one on the Service Centre that refused to look at it.

They may think 'global', but they act 'globular'.

2. Customer service is far easier when you get to choose who's your ‘customer’ and who's not.

In both Australia and Hong Kong, Samsung’s Customer Service was a comedy of errors. No responsibility taken. No help given. Not even an answer to the question I asked.

To Samsung Australia, I was not even a 'genuine' Samsung customer.

Hardly the standard of customer service excellence that a global leader wants to be known for these days, is it?

3.   If a guy from Shenzhen can fix it, why not Samsung?

At a guess, the same mega-factory in Korea that produces Australian market products also made the products I bought in Hong Kong.

Obviously, the network technology is different in different markets, so phones have different specifications.  But are they all that different? The fact that it worked in Australia as well as China and Hong Kong indicates to me they’re broadly similar.

I mean, we’re not talking apples and … (well, maybe we are).

Just how difficult would it be for Samsung to offer a limited, specialty service for international models? How much effort would it take on their part?

Some extended training for a couple of technicians and a small stock of the most common alternative components? Software shouldn’t be hard at all. And if a tricky problem meant it took a couple of days to Fedex in an out of stock part, so be it. The customer probably wouldn’t mind. The customer really just wants the job done right. 

I realise not everyone buys a phone overseas, but I can't be the only one who ever has. Nor the only one who's ever had to enquire about service for it.

It displays a distinct lack of empathy (and imagination) on the company's part to dismiss this issue so completely.

I wonder if Samsung even collects statistics on the enquiry rate for this type of service?  If you don’t actually know how many calls there are, you don’t know what you’re potentially missing out on.

There's an old joke about a shopkeeper explaining why he didn't stock a particular product ...

“You’re the tenth bloke I’ve told today, there’s just no demand for it.”

4. Customer service is a sales and marketing function.

There’s a lot of talk in marketing circles these days about the ‘customer experience’. The theory being that good purchase and ownership ‘experiences’ will lead to a future re-purchase of the brand. As we tend to be creatures of habit that’s probably true in a lot of cases.

But when there’s a problem - one that jolts us out of our complacency - we’re very sensitive to the way it gets resolved. Or not.

Perhaps Samsung thinks that people in my position should simply write off the phone and buy another. Of course, that’s one possibility, if we can’t get anyone to repair it.

But can they seriously expect that we’d buy another one of theirs?  Surely not. Which makes their service all the harder to understand.

Finally, and I have to say that this was the biggest surprise of all …

5. The CEO isn’t always the CEO.

When you invite people to ‘email the CEO (Australia)’ you create an expectation. 

An expectation they’re going straight to the head of the company.  Not to the head of the mailroom. That’s just adding insult to injury. 

And for my relationship with the brand, it was a Korea-ending decision.