I got A400 and I had issues with the brewing unit that so far has costed me 10s of thousands of pounds because of the incompetence of the UK team. Here is the sequence of events:
1. the brewing unit gets blocked, I book a visit for an engineer, then the machine starts working again. I canceled the visit, yet the engineer still shows up to say the machine is in good working order. At this point, the machine is still under warranty and the engineer's visit is covered under warranty.
2. The service team raised an invoice for the visit, I call and explain that the machine is still under warranty, and the team confirms that I don't need to pay the invoice.
3. that same weekend the brewing unit stopped working, I tried calling the out of hours team to book an engineer's visit, but no one picked up the phone for more than 6 hours (9 am to 3 pm). Once I got on the phone with the service team, they told me that they cannot book an appointment as my account is blocked as I didn't make payment for the last service visit (which was under warranty).
3. On Monday, I speak to the service manager first thing in the morning, and she asks me to leave it with her and she will come back to me. Then around 3pm when I didn't hear back from here, I called the service team, and they told me no service visit has been scheduled yet and the matter hasn't been dealt with. I asked to speak to the service manager, and I was told she left for lunch break (at 3pm!).
4. I called the credit team, and they asked me to pay £300 in advance (no invoice) to cover the under warranty (which was for less than that amount) and that they will then refund the warranty call later. That was the only way I could unblock my account and get to book a visit, and out of desperation, I made the payment.
5. four days later (Thursday) an engineer shows up and unblocks the brewing unit in a matter of minutes and tells me that the brewing unit needs to be replaced. He then goes on to say that Franke engineers usually keep stock of these brewing units in their vans, and he should have had one to replace mine, but recently, he moved his stock to his garage for some reason.
7. the engineer leaves and we start taking coffee orders. After making 2 cups of coffee and before the engineers reach the car park the machine breaks down again.
8. I refund my customers for the coffee they bought and call the Franke service team and ask them to bring back the engineer to help.
9. An hour and a half later, the engineer shows up and asks me to pay an invoice displayed on his mobile for another service visit before he can attend to my machine. Then he says that once I have paid, he will go to his home garage, pick up a new brewing unit and come back to replace the one I have.
10. At this point, the resultant was packed and busy, and I asked the engineer to leave my restaurant as I had enough.
11. Now Franke is sending emails asking to refund the excess money I was made to pay for the last service visit (they made me pay £300, and the service visit was £240).
12. it's been more than a month since this incident started and I have literary lost 10s of thousands of pounds because of the incompetence of Franke team. I escalated the matter to the sales team, but that didn't make any difference.
in summary, it's sad and shameful to see such a brilliant machine being managed by such incompetent and unprofessional team. Dealing with Franke service team made me feel like dealing with a scamming business and not a Swiss manufacturer of world class coffee machines. The credit and billing team is literary a joke and the processes are completely broken beyond repair (charging for service under repair and then refunding, sending invoices as unprotected excel files, ...). The service engineers are probably the worst, taking 4 days to attend to a machine that is not working (hence no coffee service), and attending two service calls and leave the machine unrepaired, while knowing that the problem was not fixed and will re-occur.
I still think I made the right choice choosing Franke machine, but little did I know how unprofessional, and incompetent the UK team is.
