Of all the consumer rights that are not in place in Kenya widely, broadly and universally, the one that really stands out as an aberration is the idea that most of our retailers have that faulty goods will not be replaced.
In fact, when retailers sell a product, they enter a contract. Consumers pay for the good to do what they have paid for. There is no law, right, or principle that means, having parted with their money, consumers are obliged to retain or grapple with a product that was faulty from the get go.
Yet why isn’t that known at the level of the store?
Take Safaricom #ticker:SCOM, our largest company. A company, we are led to believe, that invests heavily in customer care training, that runs a social report, analysing the impact of its business on communities and the environment, and which runs customer centres across the land.
I bought a phone from Safaricom last week, at speed: ‘thanks for the box and bag, racing home now to make dinner for my son’. I didn’t have it opened and check it worked. And then, it didn’t. It wasn’t a grand phone, a Sh9,999 Tecno smart phone. So, several SIM card trials later, off I went back to the Safaricom store at Sarit Centre, where I had bought it, to get that phone to work – in short, to be a phone.
It wasn’t possible. The sales assistants, two of them – I think I caught a cross shift, and was there an hour, not queuing, but ‘being served’ – couldn’t make that phone work with the SIM.
It didn’t recognise it had a SIM in it. The second kindly explained, eventually, that the ‘pins’ that read the SIM had dropped back, and this was why it couldn’t read that a SIM was there.
But this is the bit that floors me. A quick visit Thursday evening to buy a phone, the handing out of a faulty one, which was faulty as it left Tecno - it wasn’t a previous return, because it was handed over to me with the plastic wrapping and seal intact - and by Saturday, the Safaricom assistant is telling me I now need to go to the Tecno customer care centre in CBD to get it mended.
Their non-phone phone now becomes my phone-repair journey – which is not what I paid for, to help Tecno and Safaricom with their quality control. I paid for a working phone. That was the contract.
So I asked for the manager. The manager replaced the phone, we tested the new one, it worked, and I finally got from Safaricom what I had handed over my money (and bonga points) for. He said he could see it had never been used. He could see the purchase from the Thursday evening.
So the lessons are many:
Safaricom trains its managers that a product that’s faulty on hand out must be replaced, but it doesn’t train its sales assistants the same.
If you make a fight and escalate the matter, the law will be upheld by Safaricom.
If you don’t make a fight, you can kindly take their paid for, non-working goods and enter a journey of hours and visits to get the product you paid for to actually work. In that environment, never leave a Safaricom store without testing what you’ve been handed, on the spot.
And those are the lessons from our biggest company, possibly more geared towards customer service and customer care than any other.
Brace the small store, or the tiny retail chain, and your chances of replacement on a fault may be close to zero. Which means you test before you pay, on everything. And the retailer can pay for the extra labour and lower sales because none of us can just pay and leave.
Of course, everyone loses. Our purchase takes longer. Their queues are longer, and sales assistants more, on the slower sales. But at least we head off the risk of the good that wasn’t the good, and the fight to get one that is, for the money.
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