thebigchill said:
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Unfortunately when parts fail, sometimes the manufacturer has to take a hit. That seems like a given. My request here and previous experience is that I buy a new unit, then send mine back and potentially receive a refund once assessed. Surely you're still a customer of something, Keith, and while your response here understandably favors the vendor, I don't expect that you would like this approach to customer service if were on the receiving end.
No, I said I felt for them. The customer side of this story has been well expressed, and it's a familiar tune. But it's not as easy as you might think, I was just showing what it looks like on the other side. Having been on both ends of this, I'd like to think I've got a slightly different understanding of the realities for both parties.
Customers that are willing to pay for a new unit are not universal. That's a policy that will also create some friction - as I said, it can be the worst of all options if all it does is piss off the customer and the vendor still ends up with unusable parts at the end. If you're going to do that, you might as well not piss off the customer in the first place. Or, if you're accepting that you'll piss off the customer, you double down and make sure it's at the lowest cost possible. I'm not recommending any or all of these, I'm simply trying to lay out the thought process.
93gsxturbosaid:
I guess where I am going is in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't cost us a whole lot to take the "customer is always right" philosophy. One thing it has done is soiled me to how poorly most companies treat customer service and concerns. Seem most of them are in it for the quick buck and do not care much about the after sales support.
Admittedly, there is a pretty big difference between sending a customer a few $300 service kits on the arm for a million dollar piece of equipment and giving every flatbrimmed fucccboiw ith a stanced out Miata free parts at the drop of a hat.
A very big difference!
I've seen a number of companies go through this - they move back and forth between trying to do everything for the customer and trying to protect themselves from the customer. Once you get into the latter mindset, you have a real problem. We've been through it several times in the past couple of decades, I'll admit, and it can be hard to convince the beancounters that throwing money away is the best choice. And the relative cost/value of the product is always a factor. If you've got a huge margin or it'll only take a couple of bucks to fix a problem with an expensive part, that's an easy call.
Selling used/seconds is expensive enough that it's often not worth it. Unless you have large volumes of the stuff, you have to spend a lot of time documenting and tracking and fulfilling the order, far more money than you'd spend on a normal, new product. It hurts to take something like a perfectly good coilover that just needs a rebuild and chuck it in the dumpster, but in reality it may be the most cost-effective solution. I have a collection of coilovers sitting around my desk that attest to this, ones I can't bear to toss but should. The other option is to do what so many Amazon sellers do, just put the returned part back on the shelf as new. We all know how that turns out.