Customer Service: Garmin
This is the first of (I assume) many postings about customer service experiences that I’ve had. I want to share them with you, the readers of my blog, in the hopes that you are able to learn about the good or bad things that a company has done and either make sure to patronize a company in the future because they did a really nice job or that you stay the heck away from them because of their shoddy customer service.
I received a Garmin nuvi 350 GPS from my parents 1 1/2 years ago for Christmas. They wanted me to have one since they knew that I traveled all over the place for my job (12 counties in southwestern PA). For 18 months, the GPS was working great but then all of a sudden, it stopped working — meaning that it wasn’t able to acquire the GPS satellites and find my location — rendering the unit useless.
I went onto Garmin’s web site to see if I could fix it and learned that I could do a master reset — which actually did fix it the first time. Unfortunately, a few weeks later the same problem occurred and the master reset didn’t do anything to fix it this time — so I called Garmin support and spoke with one of their customer service folks.
I identified myself and explained when I bought the unit and what was wrong. The gentleman told me that in order for it “to be looked at and repaired” it would cost $200. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I told the man, “Um..sir….that’s half the price of the unit NEW”. He said “I understand but that’s our policy.” I told him that that price was unacceptable and that I would rather by a new GPS from another company with that $200. He paused for a second and then stated “Well…the best that I can do for the repair is $100. I sat there and said to myself “Damn….I would’ve had to pay $200 if I hadn’t complained about that price!”
After hearing about the super-quick 50% discount on the repair, I told the customer service rep that I wouldn’t even spend that much for a repair because I still thought it was too high. He paused for a second and said “Let me check out something. I’ll be right back”. He returned to the phone about 2 minutes later and stated that “because it was only 1 1/2 years old”, they would send me a “new” (refurbished) unit free of charge once they had received my old one back.
I received the new unit about 10 days later and it’s been working just fine. I’m happy that Garmin replaced the unit for me, but I’m definitely disappointed that I had to complain heavily about their customer service/support policies in order to get the free replacement that I did.
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