I purchased a utility sink/cabinet combo from Home Depot last year for $200. The same product is sold by Lowes and all over the Internet in various styles. The OEM is this company called Conglom, but Home Depot markets all its plumbing products as "Glacier Bay" and has its own support system for those products.
So anyway, I install the sink and the faucet has a small leak. So I call the Glacier Bay number expecting terrible service. The call is answered immediately. A lady takes my information and says she'll contact the OEM and get a new part sent to me and puts me on hold. She picks back up a minute or two later to say the OEM is closed for the day but she'll contact them the next day. I think that's the end of it, but then I get a call from her the next day to confirm she's reached the OEM and the replacement part is on the way.
HD can't make but a few dollars if anything on this product.
Aside, Moen also provides insanely good customer service. And I've heard Delta faucets does too. Maybe it's a plumbing thing. :-)
I've had a similar extremely amazing experience. I do a lot with 3d printing, and I buy Misumi extrusions.
During a large format printer I built, their website claimed that the 90deg brackets werent guaranteed to be 90deg ?! So, I called them, and got the secretary. I was expecting to be shoved off. She looked at the website where I indicated, and asked me to wait a few moments.
About 45 seconds go by, and I'm talking with a Japanese engineer who's fluent in English who runs the line ! He looks at the design schematic and the website, and says it had to do with a data import that didnt convert the tolerance data (90deg +- .0021) correctly, and instead put a boilerplate 'NOTANUMBER' result.
He then sent me the design schematic for all incident angles.
It was absolutely amazing - that I talked with the engineer responsible for that part in less than a minute.
> I've had a similar extremely amazing experience. I do a lot with 3d printing, and I buy Misumi extrusions.
Excellent products and customer service seems to also be a very Japanese thing.
We used to order ring clamps from a manufacturer, and they would always come back polished absolutely perfectly. We didn't order it that way, and we told them several times that they were wasting money doing that. It didn't matter; there was an old Japanese engineer running that line and he was going to be consigned to the fires of hell before a part with a substandard finish would leave his line.
Then he passed away. And even the tolerance control (which is vitally important) went to shit. It seems that attention to detail is all or nothing.
I think this sort of support has to be good because your alternative is to return it to the store, and this costs them way more.
In the past few years, I’ve noticed a proliferation of material included in the box that attempts to preempt this. “Don’t return this to the store! Call us at 1-800-WHAT-EVER for help.”
Where the customer’s remedy isn’t so easy and costly for the business, it’s much more hit or miss.
An incentive may be process improvement, combined with competitive products.
Faulty items returned to the store may or may not be returned to the manufacturer. In trying to suss out what went wrong, having the actual failed hardware in hand is useful.
And certain sectors (especially manufacturing) face numerous other competitors. A few bad reviews can have a large impact on purchases.
The defect rate for a lot
Of big box stores is something like 1:100000. Which seems really low but when you move millions/year it can be volumes. And once you reach a threshold they can cancel and even clawback money.
1:100000? That's a nonsense number because as a consumer we care about failures. A single purchase of a lemon good, and the observed failure rate for an individual consumer will be far far less. I haven't purchased 100000 items, and I have observed multiple failures in goods.
Also as a consumer, I would never notice the difference between 1:1000 and 1:100000000 (non-safety related small goods).
I’m just remembering what I heard from a documentary about Walmart. A company, like Rubbermaid, had a contract with Walmart to build millions of widgets. But they wanted it at a certain lower price and it had to meet contractual requirements. Someone in management was lamenting how the defect rate was too low and they might not make revenue. In the end it worked out, they bought new machines with better tolerances. Until Walmart came back and asked for an even lower price...
HD probably doesn’t have anyone returning their garden soil or electric wire because it didn’t work, but will have more returns on electromechanical appliances.
The Lego Group is also insanely good about this sort of thing.
If you tell them you're missing parts from a product, it'll ship. It happened to me once. The set was missing an entire bag. They shipped one out. No proof of purchase required.
If you tell them you're missing a manual or it got destroyed. They'll ship one out.
A hiccup on their site caused me to miss out on a promotional item. And when I realized, the promotion was over. They sent me one. Just my word was enough.
I have such a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with Ikea customer service. In the end, they'll pretty much always make everything right, but oh how they make you wait and run around in circles for that.
I broke one shelf on a wooden IKEA Hemnes bookshelf a while back while I was moving. Had I bought it within a year and had a receipt, they would have replaced the whole thing for me. But, because I hadn’t, they wouldn’t do anything for me, even if I was willing to pay for the replacement shelf. I’m done with them now for that reason alone.
I just had the same magical experience, but with char broil. Frustrated that the assembled grill I'd brought home was not only showing some rust, but was missing grate, I sent them a short note via web form. They called me 2 days later to confirm they were going to mail me a new grate, gave me cleaning tips, and offered to ship me a whole new one if I couldn't get it cleaned up. I was really blown away, and fully expected them to tell me to take it up with the store and sod off.
My experience has been that customer support numbers are great at conventional issues. Anything like an address change, return under warranty, or similar will probably go fine.
The issue with that is, I'll rarely call them for such a problem. Companies tend to let you fill out some form on their website for such an issue these days.
Sometimes calling with an oddball problem goes okay because you hit an excellent person on the other end, but often they're clueless, and the whole thing becomes a struggle.
This is, I suspect, made worse by call centers having metrics around call time. They want to get rid of you quickly and move to the next call.
I purchased a utility sink/cabinet combo from Home Depot last year for $200. The same product is sold by Lowes and all over the Internet in various styles. The OEM is this company called Conglom, but Home Depot markets all its plumbing products as "Glacier Bay" and has its own support system for those products.
So anyway, I install the sink and the faucet has a small leak. So I call the Glacier Bay number expecting terrible service. The call is answered immediately. A lady takes my information and says she'll contact the OEM and get a new part sent to me and puts me on hold. She picks back up a minute or two later to say the OEM is closed for the day but she'll contact them the next day. I think that's the end of it, but then I get a call from her the next day to confirm she's reached the OEM and the replacement part is on the way.
HD can't make but a few dollars if anything on this product.
Aside, Moen also provides insanely good customer service. And I've heard Delta faucets does too. Maybe it's a plumbing thing. :-)