How is Quality and Customer Service defined in the 21st Century?


On another recent thread, a poster questioned the customer service of the Marantz  brand.  They certainly have been around a while.

Got me to thinking, what has been your experience with particular brands and quality and especially customer service? 

My 21sr century experience of two popular consumer brands was that the overall quality was not good. Particularly referring to CD players where the warranties have the life span of a lightening bug. The sound quality is/was excellent, the lasers mechanisms/transports were problematic at best and abysmal at worst.

Appreciate your thoughts and possible pointers to better quality and overall customer sat. 

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Showing 1 response by tvrgeek

Do not confuse the consumer concept of "quality" with the manufacturing definition. 

Quality as we see is is does it work and for a long time. In manufacturing, "quality" is if you built what you intended and how long it lasts is "reliability"

In CS, we have excellent examples; Schiit, JDS, Gaselli, Blue Jean, all U.S. small business, VLSI ( Finland), Harvey Woodworking ( Huge Chinese OEM),FEDX,  and many others. Top notch, real people. ( Schiit does have an AI for common questions that is comically snarky but actually pretty reliable. You can still e-mail them and get an answer.  On the other side, we have Facebook. Not far is JRiver, a PAID product who expects the community to support it for free.  

Responsive customer service is still alive and well from companies who care. Do not expect China inc. to give a rats patutti. Multinationals have a more difficult time due to language barriers. Spec bid. lowest cost will have the least support.  Some companies understand, great service will tell someone, bad service will tell everyone you know. Good service is good business but it seems they don't teach that in business school.  As an example, I had an off failure in an Acura. Just after warrantee. Their response was " That does not happen to Acuras" ( cam lobe wiped) and fixed it. I would have gone back next time but they no longer produced a car I wanted.