Consumers

During a round of Christmas shopping last night, I was once again reminded of one of the more common misperceptions about Yarraa that I run into. While my shopping companion was looking at different brands of a common household item for a Christmas present, she asked me which brands she could Yarraa. "Is this brand a member? What about this one?"

It doesn't matter!

I'm doing my best to make sure all your favorite brands of electronics, kitchen appliances, power tools and all other warranty-eligible items are Yarraa members. That will, of course, enable you to register your warranties at point of sale and have all your products secured by Yarraa without you having to enter any information. But until we reach that rather lofty goal, remember: you can always register your products on Yarraa, whether the producer or retailer is a member or not! All you need is your serial number, brand name, model name or number and product type. If the company is a member, you'll enter your serial number and find the rest of the information waiting there for you. If not, the only difference is that you'll have to enter the remaining information yourself. When you send in the warranty card (or register the warranty online at the brand's website), you can enter the warranty number and length on Yarraa as well.

In fact, if you want to encourage your favorite brands to join Yarraa, one way you can help encourage them to do that is to register your purchases on Yarraa yourself. The more of their products there are registered with Yarraa, the more attractive our after-sales services and solutions will be to them! So don't worry about who is and isn't a member. Just register all your purchases, and we'll take care of the rest.

Chances are it has happened to you at some point, or someday it will. You search high and low for that extremely popular new electronic toy your niece or nephew or your friends' kids want, which is impossible to find wherever they live. For whatever reason, it is available where you live, and you buy it, box it and mail it off. You're a hero!

Until the day after Christmas, anyhow, when you call to see how your gift went over with the kids. Well, their mom or dad says, thanks for trying, but I'm afraid it got banged around too much in the mail. It didn't work.

You're sorry, of course. But you're not done. You know how things can get knocked around in the mail, and how fragile electronic toys can be. That's why you registered the gift with Yarraa before you mailed it. Never fear, you tell your friend or relative, I'll see this is taken care of.

Off to the computer you go, and in a matter of minutes you've found a list of service centres in the city where your friends or relatives live. Fill in a service request, provide the address and a contact number, click Submit, and you're done! Soon, the poor kid's parents will be contacted with arrangements to collect the item and fix it, with no hassling on their part because you've already provided the warranty information through Yarraa.

The gift might be a few days late for Christmas, but it will be working soon enough. You're a hero, again. You're welcome.

I was sick last week. Never a fun experience, but it did give me a thought on the value of Yarraa.

While on sick leave from work, I passed my time by working on my laptop computer and listening to CDs on my portable radio. In the heat of a Singapore midday, I kept cool with my air conditioner (not too cool, of course, since I was sick). Meanwhile, I was also able to keep up a modicum of comfort with tea from my electric water heater and soup heated on the stove. And I kept in touch with the office as necessary by my hand phone. Now, what if any of those had broken down? Never a fun experience, of course, but trying to make sense of what to do through the fatigue of a cold and the fog of cold medicine? While I was depending on those items to help me through the already-miserable illness? Think of the last time you were sick - how would you like to have to figure out how to get your computer fixed while you were in that state?

As we come up on cold-and-flu season, and especially with the threat of H1N1 in the background, remember, with Yarraa, you're only ever a click away from getting help. So you can concentrate on getting healthy again and staying that way, no matter what else life throws at you in the meantime.

If you were at SITEX, you know it was very noisy and crowded. While our event staff did a great job of reaching out to consumers, they may have misheard your name or misread it on the registration form you filled out. If you have since logged into your brand new Yarraa account and found that we misspelled your name, I apologize for the error.

But I'll do more than just apologize. I'll show you how you can fix our mistakes!

Just log into your Yarraa account. When you come to your My Products page, click on Setup. This will take you to your Profile page, where you can update and edit almost all your personal information - including your name! On this page, you can also add your telephone number and address, and even upload a picture to customize your Yarraa page. (It will appear in the upper right-hand corner of your page). Just click Submit and the changes will take effect.

The only thing you cannot change is your e-mail address. Speaking of which, if you registered with us at SITEX but haven't received an e-mail with your login and password, we may have entered the wrong e-mail address under your name. If you think this may have happened, just e-mail us at hr-AT-yarraa.com and we'll see to it that the error is corrected. Thank you for your patience!

After a long but exhilarating weekend, we at Yarraa would like to say thanks to everybody who helped make SITEX a smashing success for one and all!

Over the course of four days, we got to talk to thousands of people from all over Singapore, Asia and the world. Well over a thousand of them created Yarraa accounts and safeguarded their new purchases immediately with our secure after-purchase resources. Four lucky new Yarraa members won our lucky draw for a new HP Netbook.

Congratulations to Pin Xian Hoe, our first lucky draw winner!

But here at Yarraa, we feel like the winners as well: we had a chance to reach out to a lot of new partners and consumers. Soon you can expect to see more and better services from us thanks to the contacts we made at SITEX.

Be sure to visit our display next time we come to a trade show near you – you could be the next lucky draw winner! And you’ll definitely have the chance to hear a lot more about what Yarraa can do for you.