Our fairly expensive 3-year old Breville toaster oven suddenly crapped out today; elements not heating and a nasty zzzzzzt noise emanating. So I unplugged it and vainly searched online for someplace local that fixes small appliances. No dice.
In a final act of desperation I called the ‘help line’ number, fully expecting to talk to somebody named Raj Gupta fielding calls in some sweat box in Madras. Left a callback, since the queue was very long. The phone rings, and caller ID says Salt Lake City. Why, who could this be? Well, it’s a nice lady from the USA Breville center, who tells me that for a flat rate of $119, they will fix the problem, pay for shipping both directions, check the appliance over completely and give me a six month warranty on the work. Since this is a $240 convection/toaster oven, I say ‘Okey-doke’, and she immediately emails me the shipping label.
Very professional, fast and satisfying, much like I imagine a high-priced call girl would be.
Not an actual help center, but even easier than that.
I have a Chantal whistling teakettle. A few weeks ago the flipper of the whistle got stuck so it wouldn’t close properly. I was contemplating adding a new teakettle to my Chanukah wish list when it occurred to me to Google the problem. I Googled something like “teakettle whistle won’t close” and one of the first responses was a FAQ from Chantal which included this:
A few drops of cooking oil and VOILA! my teakettle was working again. I see there’s even a Customer Service number to dial if your teakettle still won’t whistle. Fortunately I didn’t need to test their helpfulness.
Even better for you: they’re just sending you a brand new one; $119 is (probably) what the dealie costs them, then it gets jacked up a couple times by retailers to $240. Source: similar situation 2+ decades ago with a “dedicated sequencer” that quit working. The company (Brother) wanted $75 to “fix” it (a $350 item) and just sent out another one hot off the press. An excellent deal, in my book. I wish I knew if they did fix it or gut it for parts. Or, roundfiled it. The world may never know.
This reminds me of several months ago when I got mail from the Florida Department of Transportation seeking to collect a fine for a traffic no-no that I, having not driven in the state of Florida in, oh, a couple of decades, didn’t actually commit. I called them expecting to do battle with the vilest forces of bureaucratic hell. But the person who answered pulled up the file, immediately noticed the error and cleared the slate within a few minutes. I was genuinely stunned at how fast and painless it all was.
My dentist, as part of their new patient pkg., gave me a nice Sonicare toothbrush. It crapped out after 2 years of twice daily use ( I replaced the brushes several times). It wouldn’t charge any more. I called the helpline, and for $7, they sent me a brand new outfit with 5 brush heads. I was thrilled, to say the least!
[Richard Dreyfuss voice]
I got that beat.
[/Richard Dreyfuss voice]
I was getting onscreen and snailmail warnings from Comcast that my cable modem wasn’t up to current standards. Despite being on their approved list, etc.
I knew about this since the spring. They had my old cable modem listed. Which I replaced a couple years ago and somehow they never noticed.
But the onscreen warnings when browsing were getting more than a bit much.
Called customer support and talked to “Steve” (yeah right). He checked it out and fixed it.
I was quite surprised (and very pleased) when Brother replaced that device of mine.
I’ll back off my claim, thusly: if the repair is obvious, cheap to do and not time consuming, they might fix yours. I can’t see them spending more than 20 minutes on it (and you know how long it takes to open something up for repair). Let us know, would you, please? I’d like to know if people still fix things. But I’m pulling for you to get a replacement.
Now, if we were talking a $2000 device, I’d think they’d be more inclined to fix it; there’s a tradeoff point somewhere there but, I don’t know what it is. Good luck!
If you do get the original back, I’ll be very disappointed if you don’t exclaim, “Now to take it for a test toast!”
Years ago I had one of those huge boxy computer monitors from Dell that failed. Just went dark and stayed inert.
I called their help line and the guy walked me through the idiot-weeding-out questions (“is it turned on? did you plug it in? is there any indication of light?” and so on). He decided it was in fact not a user error and promised they’d ship out a replacement. By the time we finished, it was after 9:00pm on a week night.
The next morning at 8:00am I get a call at work from my wife: “It’s here.” “What’s here?” I asked, not even suspecting the replacement monitor had arrived. In less than 12 hours.
Will do. The display still lit up and the countdown timer ran, but that zzzzzt noise sure sounded like a circuit board frying. There are four heating elements in this monster, and the likelihood of all four burning out at the same time is remote. My bet is on a simple board replacement.
An update I didn’t expect. I got the shipping label from Breville and sent the thing FedEx on December 29, expected delivery to CA two days. Heard nothing, so I checked the tracking number and it never got there. Picked up from FedEx, but not delivered. Called FedEx and got little help. Called Breville on the off chance it arrived but wasn’t scanned. Nope, didn’t arrive, but they said “We’ll contact FedEx to try to find out what happened, but we don’t want you caught in the middle of this, so we’ll most likely send you a new one.”
Every time I’ve dealt with Breville I’ve been happy. They both make good products and have good support for them. Frankly the design of their plugs should become mandatory. They have good customer service as well. My daughter dropped and broke the base for our wok, it was a discontinued model and they didn’t have parts anymore, but offered us 30% off a new one. That’s probably close to cost. And it was completely our fault, no defects in manufacture or anything.
Just an excellent company to deal with and excellent products from what I’ve used at least. The law of averages says they’ve probably got some crappy customer service agents or crappy products somewhere in their lineup, but I haven’t found any yet.
I have a Breville burr grinder that’s been a champ so far, and I’m also a fan of the plugs. No wrestling to get it out of the outlet, no danger of getting your fingers across a tine, and a real godsend for people with arthritic fingers.
A brand new oven arrived today, total cost to me: zero. They didn’t even charge the original $75. Breville’s appliances can be expensive, but this kind of service will make me a customer for life. Hell, they even answered my post on their Facebook page. Me so happy.
Wow. I have been pondering buying a super-duper espresso machine from Breville, with a lot of automation, and the only thing holding me back is how painful if might be to deal with if it malfunctioned. Your story swings me to pulling the trigger and buying it.
