Front-end polish and back-end chaos of smartphone sales

A service centre owner said they were told to offer 10–15% discounts if customers push back—an unusual practice that raises an uncomfortable question

At what point does a customer cease being a customer and become fair game?

It’s not customer service if it only applies to the customer who knows how to complain. (Representative photo)

I’ve been writing about technology long enough to know that pricing isn’t always rational. But this episode left me rattled—not because of the money involved, but because it exposed something quietly corrosive about how companies treat the people they claim to serve.

Here’s what happened. My daughter dropped her two-month-old phone. Sometime later, the screen blanked out. These things happen. But we had been reassured when we bought it that the warranty would cover some kinds of screen damage. So off she went with her mother to the authorised service centre.

They were first told the screen repair was covered under warranty. A little later, a call came. This time the voice at the other end said there was “physical damage,” and that wasn’t covered. The cost: ₹6,800. Estimated wait time: five days.

I paused a work call to take this one. The quoted price felt off. I told them to hold off, not pay, and bring the phone back. But the front desk was insistent: the phone had to be left behind before any estimate could be generated. Reluctantly, I gave in. Leave it, I said.

Later that evening, I made a few calls. Within 30 minutes, I had sourced a brand-new screen replacement, same model, for ₹5,300. A generic version was available for ₹1,400. Either option could be delivered in under three hours. Something didn’t add up.

The next morning, I asked my wife and daughter to retrieve the phone. When they did, the service centre suddenly revised the offer: ₹5,800, and they’d deliver the phone the next day.

They had the ability to drop the price. And the bandwidth to expedite the repair. But they chose not to do either—until I pushed. Had I not asked the right questions, we’d have been billed the original amount and waited a full business week.

This wasn’t a one-off glitch. It was something more systemic.

I decided to accompany my daughter when we went to collect the repaired phone. The staff at the counter gave us a rehearsed explanation involving “inventory backlogs” and “part-specific variances.” It was waffle. I wasn’t buying it.

Eventually, a man who clearly had operational authority walked out from the back office and asked what the issue was. I told him, plainly: If you can drop the price on demand, why not offer the best price up front? If the answer is retention, then this is not customer service. It is coercion dressed up as flexibility. That kind of practice doesn’t stand scrutiny.

He looked at me, measured, and offered two options. The first: take the discounted price. “We’re doing it only to retain you as a loyal customer,” he said. The second: they’d reattach the damaged screen and return the phone, and I could take it elsewhere.

At that moment, I missed a trick. What I ought to have said was: “Please do. But return it with the data intact.”

Because that’s the one lever companies like this still hold. Not the device, but the data. The photos, the logins, the cached files. The invisible glue that makes a smartphone personal. Had I insisted on that, the game would have changed.

Instead, I walked away uneasy, having agreed to the repair—partly because I could see my teary-eyed daughter plead that I take the deal, partly for convenience, and partly because it would keep the remaining warranty intact.

Later, I called Navkendar Singh, India Head at IDC, one of the more sober analysts in the space. I told him the story. “This is unusual and not very commonly known to be done by brands,” he responded. “Either service centres are taking independent calls on pricing, which is very unlikely since part prices are governed by the brand. Or they may be duping the customer by classifying it as physical damage to avoid warranty obligations.”

That’s the part that stayed with me.

The consumer tech economy runs on trust. When a brand says, “Leave your phone with us, we’ll take care of it,” it’s not just a hardware transaction—it’s a trust exchange. And if service centres can arbitrarily inflate costs or bend policy, the damage isn’t just to a screen. It’s to the social contract between customer and company.

At the time of writing this, multiple attempts to reach the company’s spokesperson through LinkedIn, text messages, and phone calls over the last three days have yielded silence.

In a candid off-the-record exchange, the owner of the service centre revealed that they had been instructed to offer discretionary discounts—typically between 10 to 15 percent—if a customer pushes back. The company, he said, absorbs this cost to preserve goodwill.

This isn’t standard industry practice. And it raises an uncomfortable question: if prices are flexible only when contested, how many people end up overpaying simply because they didn’t know they could ask?

It’s not customer service if it only applies to the customer who knows how to complain.

This column isn’t about one phone or one service centre. It’s about the invisible asymmetries that define modern tech consumption. The widening gap between front-end polish and back-end chaos. And the quiet power companies hold—not through their products, but through opacity.

What this story reveals are not the glitch in the system, rather how a system is working exactly as it’s designed to. And that’s the breach we need to call out.