F&P Appliances address gripes on web

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New Zealand's Fisher & Paykel Appliances is communicating with unhappy North American customers on a US website that allows consumers to post complaints about defective products.

In April last year the Herald reported that the list of complaints about the whiteware maker's goods on Los Angeles based consumeraffairs.com ran to 16 internet pages.

Customers had posted notices covering a range of woes, from clothes dryers burning clothing to faulty dishwashers, fridges and poor customer service.

North America is a key market for the Manukau-based company, and accounted for $208 million, or 19 per cent, of total operating revenue in its last financial year.

US whiteware giant Whirlpool has more than 15 times as many complaints on consumeraffairs.com as F&P Appliances. However, its sales in North America, US$9.75 billion in 2010, were roughly 57 times greater than the New Zealand company's last year.

Since April 2010, about 80 more notices have been posted on the complaint website about F&P products, mostly from US consumers.

In a few of the posts customers report positive experiences with its appliances. To address the negative ones, the firm has signed up to consumeraffairs.com's "reputation management programme".

The service allows the company to post replies to complaints on the website, including one from a customer in the US city of Indianapolis, who wrote about a dryer bought in 2007 that had "not worked a full year without breaking".

F&P Appliances spokesman Matt Orr said it was important that the firm communicated directly with its customers to resolve issues.

"We've recognised that even one complaint is significant with that person and we want to get in touch with them.

"Consumeraffairs.com is a complaint site - and it covers all brands not just us - so we pay their monthly subscription fee so we can get in touch with [customers] and solve any issue they may have."

James Bickford, the New Zealand managing director of global branding agency Interbrand, said online consumer review sites had given critical word-of-mouth a lot more power.

Prospective customers looked at these websites when researching products.

Bickford said F&P Appliances was doing the right thing in communicating directly with disappointed consumers.

"[Companies] are not spending enough time talking about how they can actually engage customers who are unhappy," he said.

Other websites are also carrying unflattering reviews of F&P products, such as Australia's productreview.com.au, on which 54 per cent of 593 F&P DishDrawers users gave the product a one star out of five rating. And in Consumer New Zealand's 2011 Appliance Reliability Survey, F&P DishDrawers were rated in the "worse" category behind dishwashers made by other manufacturers including Miele, Bosch and Whirlpool.

Orr said it was important to note that a Reader's Digest survey found F&P was this country's most trusted whiteware brand last year.

And the company announced late last month that product quality improvements had reduced warranty costs by $6 million in the year to March 31, compared with the previous year.

But Orr said the reduction in warranty costs was a result of continuous improvement within the company's operations.

Asked if he thought consumers' perception of F&P as a high-quality brand had diminished, he said: "I can't really comment on the perception.

"At this stage we know that quality is very important - that's why we continually try to improve our quality."