An OEM spends crores on the campaign, the star, the IPL slot. Then the customer buys the appliance, and for the next seven years the only human being from that brand they ever meet is a technician at their door with a toolbag.
That's the entire relationship after the sale. And it's the least instrumented thing the company does.
The OEMs are not the villain
This is where I changed my mind after a year of looking at it.
I assumed they didn't care. They do. Most of the large ones, think LG, Samsung, Livpure, have bought serious systems. Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, usually with a field engineer app bundled in. Someone senior has a slide about customer experience and means it.
The failure isn't intent. It's that the system stops working several steps before it reaches the customer's door. Here's where.
Where it actually breaks
The install base is never joined. A large OEM has the serial number in four or five places. Dispatch and billing in one system, dealer sell-out claims in another, warranty registration in a third, service history inside ASP software the OEM doesn't even own. No common key links them. So when the call centre agent asks the customer for the serial, it isn't because the company lacks the data. It's because the agent's screen can't reach it in the eight seconds they have.
Intake is free text. An agent with no appliance training types "cooling issue" into a box. That covers a compressor failure and a door seal. Different part, different skill level, different visit length. The ticket now carries a fault description that predicts nothing.
The software stops at the branch. Seats end at the pincode-level branch service manager. Below that, the app goes largely unused. Final allocation of a ticket to a specific engineer happens verbally or over WhatsApp. So the system holds a ticket, but not who took it, when, or why him.
Parts draws aren't tied to tickets. The engineer does log parts when he pulls them from inventory. But the draw isn't linked to any job. He carries a general kit, not one assembled for the day's tickets. So the part gets matched to the fault only after he has opened the machine in your kitchen.
Which is why the second visit exists. Not because anyone was lazy. Because every decision that should have happened before dispatch was pushed to after arrival.
Why nobody fixes it
None of those four failures shows up as a failure. They show up as a slightly high revisit rate and a mediocre satisfaction score, both of which get blamed on the technician.
He is the last person in the chain and the only one the customer sees, so he absorbs the whole system's error. Then he gets scored on it.
The OEM isn't failing to care. It's failing to see. Every one of those four is a data linkage problem, not a motivation problem, and no amount of pressure on the service partner touches any of them.
Fix the linkage and the visit stops being a discovery exercise.
That's the whole thing.