John Kay sent a message to Lee KunHee that said:
On 1 August 2016 we ordered a Samsung oven NV70F2793NS from the Ubaldi store in Monaco. The oven was delivered and installed on 6 August 2016. We were advised that the appliance was guaranteed for two years from delivery.
On the evening of 31 July 2018 the controls of the oven appeared to malfunction and when the oven door was opened the interrupter to the domestic electrical supply was triggered and the house plunged into darkness. When power was restored and the oven door closed the interrupter was triggered again. A further test the following morning confirmed that operating the oven triggered the electrical interrupter. For the avoidance of doubt, all other electrical appliances in the house are performing satisfactorily
That day - 1 August 2018 - we called Ubaldi after sales service and the call was transferred to an agent of Samsung, who denied responsibility on the ground that the guarantee ran from the date of the order, not from delivery, and had hence expired. We immediately visited the store from which we had purchased the appliance, and a polite assistant confirmed categorically that the appliance failure was indeed covered by the guarantee, as we had been assured on purchase, and that we would be speedily contacted by a service agent.
The following day on the advice of Ubaldi we again phoned Samsung and spoke to a different representative, who consulted with the first Samsung agent we had spoken to before again denying responsibility.. The gist of the extraordinary conversation was that the guarantee had expired, that in any event the provision of service under guarantee was a matter for the companyâs discretion, that before complaining of a fault we should have engaged an electrician to inspect the domestic electrical wiring of the house, and that if we wished to pursue the matter we should do so in writing.
Particularly offensively, the Samsung agent twice asked to talk to someone who spoke French. My wife, who took the call, is a retired academic from Cambridge University who was born and partly brought up in France and although English she speaks excellent French. The only reasonable interpretation of the call, which appeared to be pre-rehearsed, was that the participants believed that because we were not French we could be dissuaded from troubling them further by this farrago of nonsense.
We come from the UK and imagined that quite apart from the plain obligations which exist under guarantee, in the light of recent events a responsible manufacturer would be particularly concerned if one of their appliances appeared to have become an electrical hazard less than two years after its installation.
I am writing to ask that the matter now be taken forward in a professional manner by one of your senior French colleagues. We are returning to England for two weeks but would welcome a visit from a representative of your company on 23 or 24 August
