After sales service

We have had to make a couple of replacement purchases recently: a vacuum cleaner and a dishwasher. Both items were purchased from Currys. The blended experience of online search, reservation, trade-in (of old Dyson vacuum) and delivery (and removal of old dishwasher) were excellent.

However, we have been dismayed by the performance of both products.

The Hoover dishwasher firstly. The seal around the door kept coming adrift, the plate rack kept falling over and the rotary arm (that sprays the water onto the dishes etc.) would not spin. We thought our plates were too big. A call to Curry's helpline got us a home visit from the Hoover engineer. He had to trim the rubber seal and showed us how to change rack height so our plates (which are standard size) now allow the rotary arm to spin. The engineer was excellent, explaining everything and also carrying out an electrical test. The product isn't great though as the seal still keeps coming away.

Now to the Dyson. Using the Curry's helpline once again we are patched through to Dyson who are unable to accept our call - too busy?, too few contact personnel? Who knows? I leave name and number on their automated system. Two hours later no response so I tweet my views on the 'service'. I then received a call back from a very pleasant Dyson employee. Our DC25 has been registered with Dyson so they know the model number we have and I explain the problem. The cleaner will not return to an an upright position. Yes, Dyson know about this design fault and to fix it I have to turn the cleaner over and push very hard on the two wheels. The fix works. In the interim I get a direct tweet from Dyson asking if they can help!

So both these big brands know about the faults but are leaving us to find out for ourselves that there is trouble ahead.