What's up with TMR Audio?

Great point. Hope you don’t have any new customers that aren’t accustomed to your past  performance. 

Our business base was comprised of repeat and new customers, but the goal was to earn customers for life. Our customers/prospects had several suppliers from which to choose.

Many of our competitors were more mature in the business lifecycle and didn’t sweat the small stuff. They were the market leaders of course, no need in getting wound up over things. 

We loved it and thrived. As our business grew, the challenge became how not to follow in their footsteps. 

As a leader, one of my key roles was selling why we should be fanatical about making customers raving fans. It was time well spent.

Of course there are many reasons to not sweat it. It costs money, takes a lot of training, makes hiring the right employees difficult, and takes continual reinforcement. It’s the path of most resistance and takes strong leadership. Not that complex, just very, very hard. 

Sorry for the rambling, I guess I miss it more than I thought! 

My perception is that TMR has a very good reputation. I tend to trust them, for what it’s worth, and I’d buy from them.

Not returning calls or communicating with customers is causing issues. (That’s feedback from customers-not me.) Unless they consider Audiogon members defending them a part of their customer service strategy.

I’ve NOT read of TMR selling bad gear, using subpar packaging, failing to pay fair prices for trade-ins, or otherwise not taking care of customers. 

Doing all those things right- it seems careless to struggle with communication. It’s not rocket surgery. 

Here are some ideas. Remember, free advice is worth the price! 

- Update the central or individual phone recordings to reflect Holiday/special hours/days.

- Teach the staff to set up auto reply, so emails are returned immediately letting customers know what is going on with hours, etc.

- Assign team members the task of checking spam folders once daily. (The root cause of another complaint thread.)

- Put a pop-up on the website that informs customers.

- Forward the office phone to someone’s cell phone.

I’ve been retired for a few years, but have used these tactics in the past.

So, for less time than it would take to make excuses, or blame paying customers for having exceedingly high expectations...just fix it.

Happy New Year!