I am a fan of Etymotic's ipod ear cannel headphones, the Etymotic ER6i's. I've reviewed them as great, affordable entry level higher end headphones that can really change your ipod listening experience. They are also great noise eliminators with no need for a battery to get that noise cancellation to work.
Recently, i've also learned that Etymotic provides exceptional, beyond the call of duty, customer support. If you're weighing up options of a company to get your next phones from, besides thinking about quality of product, this tale of after sales support may encourage you to look at this specialist group for their excellent work and quality of support.
Technorati Tags: etymotic, gear, service, support
Here's the story. I bought a pair of ER6i's about 18months ago that went flakey on me about 9 months ago. By flakey i mean that one side was cutting in and out, and finally, pretty much just out. I thought well, that's me: i've just treated them too unkindly and maybe that's why they've turned south. When i can i'll get a new pair. In the interim, the price on these phones has come down almost 50%! making them an even better deal than when i first reviewed them. So i got another set 4 months ago. Truth to tell, i used them rarely as my listening habits in the past four months have changed somewhat. They spent most of their time safely in their case (an excellent redesign of the previous pouch - so an even better value than the earlier phones yet again). I was therefore hugely surprised to find that one day, on plugging them in, the left channel was dead.
I thought oh dang, now i have to deal with customer support and warranties - where's the bill where's the bill. I looked at the warranty page on the web site (they actually make it easy to access right from the main page of the web site) and learned that there was a 12 month warranty on these puppies.
That's when i felt like a fool: when my first set died, they were under warranty; now they weren't. But at least the current set were. I wrote customer support whom it turns out i'd written about a year before to ask about filters for the original phones and they'd been great then. This time i was writing though to ask about two things:
First, i was asking how do i proceed to do a warranty claim on the new headphones.
Second, i asked if there was any chance they'd look at the old headphones, even though they were now 6 months out of warranty and it's my fault for not thinking of that sooner.
The response and subsequent interaction was amazing. The customer support person - it turns out the same person i'd dealt with previously, said yes send them both along! That's the first great thing. The second is that i said i'd be in the states for a bit and perhaps if they were able to turn around checking them out, they'd be able to send them to me in the US, rather than back to the UK where it would take me awhile to catch up with them. Yes again - please give us both addresses and we'll do what we can.
And they did. Within a week they were out of my hands, in their shop, and then back to me.
The third great thing, that just blew me away is that in the return box, there was only one pair of headphones. The second had not made it. When i asked about this via email, they were extremely apologetic and said they'd send out that replacement pair via UPS red and that i'd have them the NEXT morning. Now, my email asking about the missing pair went to them late that afternoon. UPS red is not cheap, but they opted to use this service so i'd have both pairs before i left the country. I wrote back to say it's ok; please just send them to the UK by whatever means: i have the one pair now i can use; the other can follow. But no, there they were the next morning. There was even an extra couple sets of ear tips - i'd asked why the tips were now grey rather than white on the replacement pair. Apparently they're all going to this better grade grey tip, but since i expressed a preference for white, the extras were included with this next set.
Now, every step of that experience, from looking after an out of warranty repair, to facilitating a particular shipping request, to recovering from the smallest of errors with the greatest of grace, every step here was a demonstration of a company going above and beyond the written letter of their warranty, beyond customer satisfaction, and getting to customer delight.
It's experiences like this, along with great product to start with, that build customer loyalty for sure.
Here's a shout out to Maureen Defoort of Etymotic Customer Service and to a company that supports this kind of care.
Yet another reason to recommend these excellent headphones.
Posted by mc at August 6, 2007 09:45 PM