Looking for honest feedback here. As a business owner, I deal with my share of customer service inqueries and I don't mind testing my demeanor here among my peers and peoples.. To my delight, the vast majority of the experiences are positive. We are often praised for going above and beyond our very industry standard policies. We make mistakes like everyone else of course. I'm not patting myself on the back, just setting up the context. Anyway...
Customer emailed that they received a leaky valve from me. It's brand new, never used, never taken apart.
I'm in the middle of writing back saying "of course we'll replace it, we have a one year warranty" when I decided to just quickly find the order to see when it was purchased. I couldn't find it in our shipping system's dashboard, but that only goes back 6 months. I figured I'd go all the way into the ordering system because it's not time filtered. I see that the same customer placed a few orders in recent months/years but couldn't find the valve order. Eventually I found it. The customer bought it in November of 2016. That means the warranty against MFG defects ran out Nov 2017. If you do the math, it's 3+ years out of warranty. I refused the warranty replacement.
I get it, it doesn't hurt to ask right? On the other hand, the customer went full nuclear. This is one of those cases of principal. If it had been a few months out of warranty, I'd probably bend. I've done it plenty of times especially for repeat customers. I think in this case, I was even a little insulted that someone would berate me for refusing to full warranty replace a 4.4 year old item. I don't know, maybe I'm out of touch but I think it's on the customer to discover problems with purchases within the warranty period. Imagine buying a new car with a 3 year/36K warranty and trying to claim that the engine won't start 12 years later. Yeah but it has zero miles on it.
I'm ranting now... what say you?
Customer emailed that they received a leaky valve from me. It's brand new, never used, never taken apart.
I'm in the middle of writing back saying "of course we'll replace it, we have a one year warranty" when I decided to just quickly find the order to see when it was purchased. I couldn't find it in our shipping system's dashboard, but that only goes back 6 months. I figured I'd go all the way into the ordering system because it's not time filtered. I see that the same customer placed a few orders in recent months/years but couldn't find the valve order. Eventually I found it. The customer bought it in November of 2016. That means the warranty against MFG defects ran out Nov 2017. If you do the math, it's 3+ years out of warranty. I refused the warranty replacement.
I get it, it doesn't hurt to ask right? On the other hand, the customer went full nuclear. This is one of those cases of principal. If it had been a few months out of warranty, I'd probably bend. I've done it plenty of times especially for repeat customers. I think in this case, I was even a little insulted that someone would berate me for refusing to full warranty replace a 4.4 year old item. I don't know, maybe I'm out of touch but I think it's on the customer to discover problems with purchases within the warranty period. Imagine buying a new car with a 3 year/36K warranty and trying to claim that the engine won't start 12 years later. Yeah but it has zero miles on it.
I'm ranting now... what say you?