Appauling customer service from Samsung Signature in Bryanston

Dear all,

Do not be fooled by the promise of receiving customer service from Samsung Signature. Also, do no buy the 65" Samsung QLED tv.

About three months ago, I bought the above mentioned premium Samsung product. After having the tv for one week, it started giving me problems ranging from the tv not switching on to displaying of blue lines on the tv and having no signal. Other times, the tv does switch on, but gives two different error messages stating that there is not signal.

Firstly, it takes at least a week to get the technicians to your place after logging a call. The first couple of times, I dealt directly with consultants and technicians over the phone, but they could not assist. Technicians were then send out to my house, but they also could not really address the problem. In the space of three months, the same technicians were at my house three times. In fact, on all three occasions, the technicians admitted to me they and Samsung are aware of the problem with this particular tv (with other clients). This problem is with the fiber optic cable at the back of the tv. This cable is so fragile and often results in the loss of signal to the tv from the DSTV decoder.

After the third time of having the technicians at my place and after numerous interactions with two different brand engineers from Samsung in Bryanston, I decided to escalate the matter further. This experience was even worse than dealing with the two brand engineers, who promised that they will resort my problem, but never did.

After months of dealing with the call center and the brand engineers, a guy with the name of Louw van Wyk, also from Samsung Signature service in Bryanston, called me. I am not sure of his title (he never properly introduced himself), but I assume he is the supervisor of the brand engineers that I communicated with. From the onset of the telephonic call from him, I got the impression he was never really interested in resolving the matter. Louw was very rude, unprofessional and had very little s****s in terms of how to provide top-level customer service. After I explained the situation to him, he started making counter arguments and at one point started raising his voice over the phone. I was completely shocked at how he handled the situation. The matter was never resolved over the phone, and he simply said that I must accept the product as is, with the defects that Samsung was aware of all along. I followed-up the telephonic conversation with an email to him in which I clearly express my disappointment and dissatisfaction with the product and the lack of customer service, but never even bothered to reply. An excerpt from the email is shown below:

"I find it difficult to simply accept that nothing more can be done when I am persistently inconvenienced by technical difficulties by a "premium" samsung product that fails to serve the basic purpose of a TV.

If you track the number of calls I logged initially to the Samsung call center to report the problem, and if you look at the clips I sent Sebastian and showed to the technicians, you can clearly see there is a problem. These problems you are aware of - different error messages of no signal, lines or blue flashing on tv, or sometimes the tv does no even switch on..."

It has been two-and-a-half weeks and I have never heard back from him. This follows conclusive proof (by means of photos and recorded video clips) that I have shown to the technicians and the brand engineers. He was also copied in on most of the email communications between myself and the brand engineers.

I am appalled by the poor customer service received for such a premium product, with a retail price at the time of R55k. One of the reasons I bought this tv was because of the promise of good customer service from Samsung Signature. This sadly has never materialized. I was planning to buy more appliances from Samsung, but have since changed my mind. I highly recommend to anyone not to buy Samsung products, based on my experiences and that of some of other people that I know.