Westinghouse GSP627S

Very Poor Electrolux/Westinghouse Customer Service – After I posted a review, in April 2013, about the problem of the oven door of our Westinghouse GSP627SLP never having shut properly, I received a message from Electrolux/Westinghouse Customer Care expressing concern and asking me to contact them. I notice that Westinghouse responds in this way to all the bad reviews they get – perhaps they hope to create the impression that they have decent customer service. Don’t be fooled.

The customer service representative I talked to refused to take my word that defective manufacturing was the cause of this fault, and said Westinghouse wouldn’t do anything until the appliance had been inspected by a service engineer.

We spoke to the local service engineer who said he had heard of this oven door problem before, and he would contact Electrolux/Westinghouse for technical advice and get back to us.

We phoned him a number of times over the following months, and each time he told us that his contact either was on holiday or had not returned his calls. Finally, in August, he said he had spent a lot of time on the phone trying to get this information from Electrolux/Westinghouse without success, and unless we were prepared to pay for his time he was not going to pursue this further.

I emailed Electrolux/Westinghouse again about this poor level of customer service, and sent photographs of the faulty oven door and of the broom which we were forced to use to wedge it shut.

The representative located another engineer, and agreed that Westinghouse would pay for the costs of any parts needed to repair the oven, but without knowing the source of the fault they would not agree to covering labour costs. I reluctantly agreed to pay the engineer’s call out charge to get this issue resolved. My understanding was that if it proved, as we believed, to be a manufacturing fault, Westinghouse would take responsibility for this and reimburse the costs, as it is their obligation under consumer law to sell a properly functioning appliance. Note that the representative insisted on conducting all communication by phone so I do not have a record of this.

At the end of September, the engineer fixed our oven door. The fault lay in the hinge support brackets. Each of these is a simple metal piece with a hole in it, into which the hinge locates. There is nothing that can go wrong with this part. The problem with our oven door was that the wrong brackets had been fitted at point of manufacture. Once these brackets were replaced with the correct parts, the oven door closed fully. We paid him $120.

I emailed Electrolux/Westinghouse with a copy of the invoice, but they refused to reimburse us. I asked them for a copy of the service engineer’s report, so I could read his assessment of the problem, but they refused to let me have this. And that was the end of it.

If the fault had been due to wear and tear we would have been happy to pay labour costs. Instead the fault lay with the factory which fit the oven door, but Westinghouse were not honest enough to admit this. So we are out of pocket for repairs to a faulty product, and for the massive excess gas usage to heat up the defective oven for two years.

The engineer had also looked at the faulty clock timer and melted knobs, and offered to order parts to replace the ones which have warped from being exposed to the heat leaking from the oven, but Electrolux/Westinghouse - after having agreed to pay for parts - pettily refused to cover the relatively minor costs of this. The engineer ordered one small part for us (which we said we would pay for) - and, to add insult to injury, it took Westinghouse until the middle of January to post this to him.

There appear to be quality control issues in the manufacture of Electrolux/Westinghouse appliances, but rather than the company recognising this and taking responsibility for faulty products, the customer who complains is treated as an enemy to be outwitted and worn down.

Faulty manufacture and unresponsive customer service.