W-Support – A total disaster

W-Support – A total disaster

January 14, 2013 | By Lucas

On the 27th Dec. 2012 the camera flash of my Lumia 920 stopped working. Annoyed (this is the 4th defect I had with the Lumia 920!) I decided to send it to repair instead of returning it… So I filled in the service task and sent my device to W-Support – a service partner of many OEMs including Samsung and Nokia in Germany.

Except for my device arriving on the 4th January, which was the fault of DHL, everything progressed well… at first! Soon after arrival on the 4th the online repair status was updated to “device arrived; repair in progress” – and did not change till the 11th Jan..

The website says the normal repair for Nokia devices takes 5 days inclusive shipping so I was somewhat annoyed at having to wait but when I checked the status on the 11th I at first was pretty happy: After so many days without a phone the repair finally was finished!

The status was “forwarding to shipment department”… I thought the device would leave the same day, which would make the status change to “shipping”… but no such luck! When I checked the status first it was about 1 pm… and that’s the way things stayed until Saturday, with the phone finally arriving on Monday.

Today I got my device back and with it the worst part of the whole experience… it was NOT repaired! The device looked like it hadn’t  even been checked! The not working camera LED is such an obvious defect, but they sent the device back unfixed (but on the invoice was written: “repair successful”). Also, the device inside the package was TURNED ON and not even completely reset.

When I called the support the lady on the phone told me the following, translated from German:

“Well, we did not really know what do to with the phone. So we send it to Nokia, but they sent it back to us”

I find that story somewhat fishy, as  the repair would have taken much longer plus the online status would have said so.

This was not the only problem I have had with W-Support. In 2011 the display of my Lumia 800 had some dead pixels. The display needed to be changed so I did the same as with my Lumia 920: I sent it to W-Support. After 5 days (yes, it actually seems to work within 5 days) the device came back. Everything worked perfectly, except…

… W-Support damaged the unibody of my device. There were indentations around the screen which seem to have been caused by pulling out the screen with a screwdriver.

You may think it was only me having a streak of bad luck but after a bit of research I found out I am not the only one disappointed with W-Support’s “support”.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the option to let my devices be repaired somewhere else, but if you have, definitely choose somebody else to fix your device.

Have our other German readers been disappointed by Nokia’s support partner? Let us know below.