Horrible customer experience attempting to switch from iPhone to Samsung

[mjafari]

I grew up being interested in consumers electronics especially smart phones and still am. I often read tech news related to phones. I have been an iPhone user since the original iPhone almost 15 years. Since I was the go-to tech person in my family/ community – when anyone would come seeking advice on what phone to get in early days – I advised them to get an iPhone resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales for Apple

Recently upon doing some research on smart phones – it came to my awareness that Apple wasn’t innovating as much, and Samsung seemed more innovative. I wanted to switch to Samsung s23 Ultra after doing lots of research – only to be turned away at the Samsung store for some petty reasons. The employees in Samsung store didn’t seem interested to help me – instead they directed me to go online and make the purchase instead. It seemed to me that most of these folks neither care about their job or company and would make any attempt to brush you off without helping you. I noticed this across dealing with people from Samsung at every level from store, to online, on the phone and senior managers.

I was sick and tired of dealing with people from Samsung to purchase this phone, so I went into JB and other retailers to purchase and unfortunately Samsung has deliberately put a cap on their supplies to divert people to their online store, but their online store experience is horrible – system is often down, did not link to my account etc. Unfortunately when making my purchase online after facing countless issues such as site being down error, etc I managed to place an order for s23 ultra to pick it up from store as the person told me they had stocks to be turned away again citing that I need to wait for delivery which takes 7 days and additional 3 days to go to store– while buying a $2 pen from amazon takes a day.

On their website Samsung offers customers to email the CEO office which I did and the response I got was baffling. All I wanted was to buy a phone but encountered such unnecessary issues to be merely told cheap words such as they are sorry – not taking any useful action to resolve my issue or offer any generous compensation to make up for the horrible experience – especially from the CEO office – one would expect more. The ceo office offered me 15% off Samsung accessories – first no one would buy a Samsung accessory because they are expensive and even if they did it would not exceed $100 resulting in $15 credit which is a joke after going through so much headache.

I made a final attempt to resolve this by starting online chat – request that I wanted phone to be delivered to my house instead of store because frankly I don’t want to deal with those people anymore yet again the person told me it’s not possible, I requested to cancel my order that I’ll go to jb and buy from them – the person advised I cant cancel my order and after I insisted that it’s against Australian consumer law – they told me that it would take over 20 days to process my refund which I find is absolutely illegal and not right. In my 15 years being an Apple customer – I have never experienced any of these nonsenses. I’d be wrong to say Samsung makes good products, but their customer service and support seems to be extremely low in comparison to their competitors.

Samsung will unlikely care or treat customers concerns seriously but that's been my personal experience which I'll gladly share with others, leave my honest reviews all over the internet and I'll mention this to big tech reviewers on podcasts etc about my personal experience with Samsung and advise anyone to stay away from Samsung as they will leave you hanging dry when you need help the most

[Troubadour]

If you still want to buy a Samsung phone make sure it is sourced from Samsung Australia. Read ip on buying a grey matket phone some shops sell a grey market phpne when an Australian model is not available. Some companies only sell grey market phones. Problems with grey market phones are model may not suit Australian specifications, no service or support from Samsung Australia, if an overseas warranty is available it may lead to long lead times by needing to be sent overseas.
Having said all that, I have a grey market phone from Kogan and an Australian sourced tablet. I am looking at replacing the phone with a new model with dual sim, not available from Samsung Australia, subject to compatability.
If you want to read stories of bad service and support, on the Community page top right is a magnifyimg glass, open it and search for service, poor service and variants. Or just keep following this forum 😒

[blunderbuss89]

There's so much to unpack here so I'm going to break it down. Obviously you've never had to deal with Apple support thus the pedestal. I personally made the switch from Apple to Samsung this year ("officially") but have had Samsung products in the past and Apple's support makes me want to gauge my eyes out.

Samsung putting a cap on retailers sounds like a very bad marketing strategy. Do you realise the net margin profit they gain from retailers? So this theory is odd.

Were you unable to have the phone delivered to your address? I know they don't accept parcel lockers and as someone who works multiple jobs this is often a let down but I can see the reasoning behind it. I've never personally opted for store pickup but I know that option is there.

What stage was your order at? Was it an online exclusive? Having worked in ecommerce too I understand there's certain stages of an item where it's unable to be cancelled and refunded thus having to go through the hassle of refusing the order. An online exclusive too states that it doesn't fall under the return policy (I've studied consumer law it sounds dodgy but legal).

Also I hope things pick up for you and sorry to hear of your experience. I personally love my S23 Ultra and much rather it than my old IPhone (but you can't take my Ipad away).

[Dolgogi]

For the record, the Samsung stores are run by RPG, not Samsung.

You said they turned you away with petty reasons, what do you mean by that?

Which store was this?

[Icelite]

I live in Sydney so I go to the Samsung store on George Street.
I give them maybe an 80/20 rating I have had a couple of bad experiences but overall they have been pretty helpful. But I do concur that most of them do not understand the product they are selling.
Hence why I order it through telstra.
But Dolgogi's explanation that they are not run by Samsung explains a lot.
I did order my watch through the website and it got delivered to my address
No problems there except for the inaccurate shipping updates.