RM - Warranty issues

[Zammo]

As most of you know RM decided to stop selling hardware towards the end of last year. The announcement was sudden and my experience of the partnership RM set up with Misco to ease the transition hasn't been brilliant.

 

Anyway, as we still have a large amount of equipment under warranty with RM, imagine my surprise when I get this message today after logging a call with them for a PC that has failed for the 3rd time in as many months:

 

 

"Please be informed that we are not currently processing hardware support call as we are transiting over to a new support provider, you will be contacting on the week commencing the 14th with more information."

 

Now being as the warranty on this device clearly states "Next working day on site repair for faults logged before 12 Noon" - I am absolutely livid

 

A little digging around has revealed that RM appear to be transferring their warranty service to a 3rd party of some sort. I will be finding out more details from our account manager tomorrow.

 

So this post is just as warning to others who have RM kit under warranty - I dread to think what would happen if one of the servers was to go down whilst RM are "not processing hardware support calls"

[plexer]

Well at least they are transferring it which was what was obviously going to happen and these things do not just happen over night.

 

Ben

[Zammo]

Sorry Plexer but I don't agree with that at all.

 

If RM were going bankrupt then yes I would be grateful that the warranty was safe. But being as RM are in fact still touting for business in other areas (services\software) they should be doing their utmost to keep their existing customers happy.

 

Unannounced changes to existing warranties makes me question whether they can be relied upon to deliver what their contracts promise.

[plexer]

They announced they were pulling out of the hardware market months if not years ago now so how do you expect a company that no longer has a hardware division and made all those techs etc... redundant to be able to continue to service those warranties themselves? Therefore the only option is to transfer that side of things to one of the many hardware warranty providers with the necessary resources to support the customers.

 

RM are moving towards being a software/services company as you've stated and that's entirely the direction they are going so I can't really how you see it as being all of a sudden.

 

Ben

[Zammo]

I expect:

 

a) A reasonable level of notice and information as to how and when the changes are taking place. Being told during the transition is not good enough in my eyes.

b) The warranty that the school purchased to be honoured. This is currently not the case.

 

I don't believe my expectations are unreasonable. If you think they are, than we will have to agree to disagree...

[plexer]

I'm not saying your expectations are unreasonable I'm just stating my viewpoint on the matter and when they announced they were moving hardware to Misco they also said that over the next year the warranty service would be transitioned to a 3rd party.

 

Ben

[spacebar]

Read the small print, im sure they will have a valid path.

[Norphy]

Didn't RM use 2e2 for warranty support? And didn't 2e2 go belly up? We always used to get 2e2 engineers out to service our RM kit when we used it.

[Oaktech]

We used to get 2e2 as well.

 

I'm pretty concerned as the only thing we have with RM now is hardware warranties. Our DCs and MIS all run on RM warranted hardware, so for the next few months until we get rid of it fully I will bricking it every day.

[Edu-IT]

Is this just on desktop, or servers too??

[plexer]

They are still flogging servers and infrastructure according to the website.

 

Ben

[Chris_]

Is this just on desktop, or servers too??

 

All RM hardware (laptops, desktops and servers) warranties will be dealt with by this 3rd party company apparently.

[Michael]

"Please be informed that we are not currently processing hardware support call as we are transiting over to a new support provider, you will be contacting on the week commencing the 14th with more information."

 

Hopefully from the 14th (which is next Monday) all warranty details will be revealed. I'm sure they will honour it, but I agree that if it were your server this would be a problem, but thankfully it isn't!

[Edu-IT]

Post who it is when you know please?

[chris_uk]

Seems like Kelway have picked up the support, RM offloads support to Kelway after PC exit - 11 Apr 2014 - CRN UK News

[Edu-IT]

That is correct.

[featured_spectre]

I expect:

 

a) A reasonable level of notice and information as to how and when the changes are taking place. Being told during the transition is not good enough in my eyes.

Whilst I agree with this, RM announced years ago that they were no longer continuing with hardware warranties as of a certain date, if you didn't check thoroughly if they were transitioning, and as such would not be able to live up to the agreement which you thought you had throughout the contract, then that is YOUR fault not theirs. They gave ample warning, many many many times.

b) The warranty that the school purchased to be honoured. This is currently not the case.

See above, YOU should have checked, they made it known, you didn't follow up and look into things, they're not at fault, you are.

 

I don't believe my expectations are unreasonable. If you think they are, than we will have to agree to disagree...

Looks like we are disagreeing because you didn't do your due diligence on the company properly.

 

As much as it makes me shudder to side with RM, they're completely in the right!

[Edu-IT]

When did they announce they had passed it to Kelway? Only way I found out was by asking myself. And I did follow their recent hardware announcement. I don't believe they have contacted anyone about it?

[plexer]

You will still be rm customers kelway are just taking on all support services i.e taking the calls and deploying their engineers.

 

Ben

[Chris_]

When did they announce they had passed it to Kelway? Only way I found out was by asking myself. And I did follow their recent hardware announcement. I don't believe they have contacted anyone about it?

 

The first I knew it was moving was when I called up about a replacement part under warranty and was told I'd have to wait a few days as all of their stock had been sent to another company. Then I got an email update from Kelway today about my parts being sent out.

 

Still not had anything from RM to tell us about the changes.

[HTCPCP]

I know when I spoke to our regional sales manager at BETT this year to find out some info about what was happening, I was told that they would be making a change, however current service levels would be maintained and that they would notify customers closer to the time with all the details. No mention in January about any potential downtime in warranty repairs. All I can say is thankfully we don't have many RM machines left with any warranty.

[mp4-dave]

We've been having the 2e2 / Kelway engineers for a while to do warranty calls having opted for the hardware only warranties. They've always been as good as the RM engineers who were very good. The problem I have with this is the lack of explanation for a two week gap in service calls. I logged a call and received a reply that this was now a chargeable call when the kit was under warranty. After chasing my account manager it turned out that they were moving contracts and that everything would be back to normal in a few days.

I guessed that all their support work would go to a third party at some point but I don't see why they couldn't email the exact dates to customers with warranties or put a notice on the website where you log calls. Communication is still an issue for RM despite all of the improvements that have been made in other areas.

[GeekyPete]

Stock, spares, contracts all going over to Kelway. RM will still be selling warranties on the 3rd party kit they sell but using Kelway to deliver the service.

 

If the OP had called for service this week instead of last he wouldn't be any the wiser. It was just unlucky that he called when they were in the middle of the move. Atleast they timed it during school holidays. I called them to swap out a HD in a server this week. Raised the call in the afternoon, engineer on site at 9am the next day. Strangely I recognised him as an ex E2E engineer.