Different brands level of servicing and spare parts

This is another one of the great questions which the sales consultants have no idea at best and don’t care at worse. Either way they will still tell you “they’re great, they’re a giant company and spare parts and servicing are never an issue!” because their job is to help you purchase what you want to buy.

I want to focus on with this more of what is standard across most companies and what isn’t and give a best brand/way to purchase on the 7 year average I experienced

Hold times

• Each Brands hold time to answer the phone or the time for a service tech to come out is constantly changing based on what the higher ups in the companies are willing to spend on Customer service. EHP which is AEG, Electrolux, Westinghouse, Chef, Kelvinator and some more brands under their banner were consistently the best and easiest to deal with

-Network coverage

• Anything outside of Metro areas use the same service agents, so if you’re 2 hours from Metro don’t expect good service from anyone. For outside of Metro the brands that still provided great service were you’re specialty brands like Wolf and V Zug. You’re paying for it, but they always tried to meet the needs of their customers

-Readily available spare parts

• This gets no winners, with so many parts being made over seas and not even in the country the products are made I saw through covid how little parts where actually kept in Australia

-How long the brands hold spare parts

• This came down to normally how large the company is, but even more importantly did they even make the product themselves (Which is a whole other challenge when purchasing). I consistently saw brands who made the product themselves keep parts 20-30 years. The question to find out is “Did this company make this product?” Brands who dropped shipped in particle like what you see at Bunnings are Aldi wouldn’t even have parts as required under ACCC and would make you buy most of the product again for pretty much full cost to get around this.

So my advice is

-Avoid no name products

-Get products actually made by the company

-Buy from a retailer who you think will help if you have an issue with the manufacturer