Warning About Miele's Appalling Customer Service

[youbeatmetoit]

This is a genuine warning about the customer service I have received from Miele. Given the cost and supposed quality of their goods the service is terrible.

It’s genuinely the worst experience that I’ve had with a company. The only contact number they will provide is first line support who will only log a message and promise a call back within 48 hours. They have never kept this promise and I have had to continually chase.

When eventually I did get a call I had a very aggressive woman tell me that the behaviour of the tumble dryer is a ‘characteristic’ and they can not and will not fix it. She was trying to condescend me and acted like I was stupid for not accepting their excuse.

This noise only appears after about 6 months of use and is common to Miele T1 machines. Because they refuse to fix it they call it a 'characteristic'. However, in none of their product literature, marketing materials and videos do they every say that this will happen. The machine is now louder than the stated 64db in the product materials so on that basis it does not work as expected.

Given that Miele are fully aware of this issue and choose to hide it from customers, it constitutes a misrepresentation of goods and there should be a class action against Miele for either negligent misrepresentation or fraudulent misrepresentation.

Even the engineers that have looked at the machine admit that it shouldn’t make the noise it does but that there is no fix.

But apart from the issue with the dryer, the customer service provided has been so poor and totally unacceptable.

Hi, previous employee here.

Just letting you know that the call center that many customers complain about is actually operated by Teleperformance, a telecommunications company that works with several major brands (such as Apple, Facebook, Dropbox, Mercedes, Netflix etc). Teleperformance provides dedicated teams of agents for each client company and before TP, a similar third-party call center handled Miele's customer service.

At the time I worked there, the English/Irish Miele project was based in Greece and will be soon relocated to the Philippines. This means that the agents were/are located in Greece, with none living in the UK or Ireland.

The department was SEVERELY understaffed (only 70-80 agents for the whole project which included the customer service, spare-parts and aftersales team) and there was no support whatsoever from the higher-ups or the company as a whole, while the pressure we were under was enormous. There was a huge backlog of emails (more than 1200 unread emails in our inbox) and inquiries we were trying to deal with, while also responding to the numerous calls we received on a daily basis.

I hope this clears things up a bit, at least regarding the customer service part.

I am currently having an issue with Miele.
My husband bought a hob from them and after getting a text telling me it would be delivered yesterday, it did not turn up .
I have had no answer from Miele or the Delivery company ARROWXL, and have had a very frustrating morning.
I have also had to cancel the electrician, he is coming back tomorrow but I have no idea if the hob will be delivered or not.

I totally agree about how awful Miele customer support is and the repair service is unreliable and unreasonably expensive. They seem content to destroy the brand image.

I've been without a working washing machine since 24 March after having a Miele engineer out that day and since then trying to resolve a complaint with Miele.

Miele Customer Support staff seem to have been instructed to be as rude and unhelpful as possible (compare Virgin being fined recently for their cynical deliberate manoeuvres to prevent account cancellations).

Be VERY wary of booking a fixed price repair: my recent experience is that if you haven't correctly diagnosed every issue including internal parts ready for replacement, the 'senior technician' at the end of the engineer's phone will veto the engineer fitting needed spare part(s) and you will be obliged to pay for a second call out at £189 in London (£179 elsewhere) plus parts (or £299 for a second fixed price repair).

For background, in March I reported that my machine was not draining and spinning properly and booked a fixed price repair for £289 paid upfront. During the engineer's visit, he ran a load of diagnostic tests and said my machine had done around 6,500 of the 10,000 hours it was engineered to do. It needed a blocked breather pipe to be emptied (not even replaced) to restore proper drainage. Additionally, the engineer said two spare parts costing around £100 total were need to make the machine safe to use in future (worn suspension legs and a partially perished top concertina hose that might split and leak water onto the motor – eek!). The engineer himself was a gent but during each visit, engineers have to check in with a senior technician by phone and the technician said the engineer was not permitted to fit the necessary spare parts on that visit.

I rang customer services while the engineer was still with me to query this outcome, as paying a further £289 or more for parts and labour seemed unreasonable. The first call handler suggested meeting me halfway on costs before I got cut off and I didn’t have his name to be reconnected. The second handler refused to consider meeting each other halfway and said I needed to buy a new machine! I questioned the engineer about this and he wholeheartedly refuted the need to replace the machine – it just needed £100 of new parts.

I submitted a formal complaint to Miele and the handling has been painfully slow - responses are supposed to be sent within '48-72 hours', but I had to wait several weeks for a meaningful response each time I emailed Miele. Whenever I chased them by phone, I was fobbed off and told my complaint was with the management team and they would be in touch 'as soon as possible'. Tbh, feels like Miele has been deliberately trying to grind me down to make me give up...

After weeks of delays during which I was unable to use my washing machine, Miele finally agreed to fit the spare parts for free ‘as a gesture of good will'. The second engineer took the front of the machine front off and immediately said the machine had to be written off as there was rust on the machine. (The first engineer had the machine open for ages and never mentioned rust as a block to doing the repairs). The rust looked VERY superficial and I was left feeling that the second engineer had been instructed to write off my machine (possibly for a bonus) regardless of the first engineer’s repair report.

Miele's modus operandi seems to be to get people to buy a new machine wherever possible, instead of fixing older machines used for thousands of hours less than the 10,000 hours Miele say they are engineered to deliver.

Imagine if I'd paid for both engineers' visits (between £478 and £578 in total, depending on second option) just to be told the machine had to be written off?!

Miele automatically discount the cost of a fixed price repair from the cost of a new Miele machine, but this is not much of an incentive, given how expensive and restrictive their repair service is. Given how contradictory the two engineers' reports were, and the awful customer support and delays, I asked Miele if they would give me a free 10-year warranty to help offset concerns about buying another Miele machine. At the end of June, Miele refused to grant this ,so I won't be buying anything from Miele in future.

I bought a Miele machine at greater expense for its longevity to avoid unnecessary landfill. It seems that now, even if a machine is economically repairable, Miele won’t repair them over a certain age, even if usage is far below that to be expected from Miele machines.