lanka.vivekSo many of those wouldn't have even reviewed the phone on Flipkart. The problem here is, the people in the company who actually matter (mods here, engineers, High rank posts) don't really know the post-purchase Dynamics of Indian market. People here are not used to knocking doors of service centers. People here are not used to reviewing products on company forums.Hi @Anders_ASUS! Thanks for patiently clearing all our doubts. I m from India and I m here to put forward a few issues.
I was super excited buying this phone considering its flagship processor, near stock android, a promising battery pack and an interesting camera implementation. It did meet a lot of my expectations for the first 10 days. Then the crashes started happening.
I sent my unit to f1 info solutions, which is an Asus approved service centre here in Bangalore.. they sent me back my unit after doing a factory reset and NOTHING ELSE. As expected, the unit started malfunctioning again after a couple of days of use.
The second time, I went there personally to the service centre after driving there for 1 hour on a Wednesday afternoon. After me (a junior doctor with zero technical knowledge about phones) explaining to them that this is a motherboard issue which is being talked about all over the internet, they finally agreed to ‘run diagnostics’.
4 days after keeping the phone, they told me that it’s in fact a motherboard issue but that it’s gonna take a couple of weeks for the part to arrive. Tentative ETA according to them is September 30th. I bought this phone on the 13th of August and I got to use it satisfactorily for 10 days so far.
Sending out faulty batches of phones by mistake is a common phenomenon in the tech industry. I had similar issues with my Samsung note 5 three years back. But the replacement experience was so smooth that I didn’t even feel a pinch. But what I have experienced with Asus so far is abysmal. May be this is not the case in other countries but the experience is nothing but pain in India.
And regarding the frequency of occurence of this issue, this motherboard malfunction is a much more common phenomenon than what is apparent on these forums. Please do not be fooled by the 30 comments that you see here. Many average consumers in India dont even know that they can raise these issues on Asus forums. I m presenting some screenshots from the biggest online store selling asus zenfone 6 in India - Flipkart.
As of now, a total of 2649 certified buyers have reviewed the phone on the site out of which a fat chunk - 267 of them (>10%) - gave it a 1 star rating. If you read the comments, most of these 1 star ratings complain of restarting/booting/crash related issues. 10% is by no means a small number. Again, I m not sure if this is a problem which is exclusive to India.
I m a frustrated customer from India and I m looking for answers.
View post
If you go to some service centers of any company (Except Xiaomi, Credit where due), you ask them to switch between primary to wide angle camera on the phone, they will switch from back camera to front camera. You ask them what processor the phone runs, they say "Sir it has N gb of RAM and super AMOLED display". This is my experience with Samsung, Oppo, Vivo, Asus, and even Apple.
No company has ever stressed on post purchase convenience in India, no one being at fault, because European or American strategies don't work in India.
From personal experience, when I had the motherboard issue, mods said "Go to the nearest center and they will replace the motherboard and everything will be solved". Like it was so easy. I knew before I even got into this vicious cycle, about how painful and harassing of an experience it would be to explain to Indian executives that it's a motherboard issue, right when I read that comment. At the ground level, the centers don't like talking on the phone. They don't behave like they are obligated to talk to me or even repair my device. Again, most people working there don't know their job and are just script readers.
People get paid without doing jobs, few cases never get media limelight, new people keep buying phones, in the end, the customer suffers.
