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Sorry to ask another boring business question, chaps! Do you have standard guarantees on your jobs, or does it vary? Does everything go in writing? I'm starting to wonder if written guarantees could be more trouble than they're worth...

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Hi Keith,

Written guarantees are hard to frame and even more difficult to administer as they must accommodate all the different types of work, sales and repairs you do including making judgements as to whether the problem is your responsibilty.

Here in Australia, they are unnecessary anyway:   A simple "All work Guaranteed" works for us as statutory warranty laws are in place in Oz and covers all work carried out and customers rights.   It also encourages the customer to make us their first option in the event of something not being right which protects our reputation and builds trust.

My business mentor told me about this early on, along with the best advice I ever got: "keep it simple and keep the conversation short"

Regards,

Rusty.

 

No written guarantee - just a verbal statement: "We;ll try our best to keep you happy with our work."  If a customer pushes hard to get something more specific and written, my inclination is to decline the job.  Unreasonable expectations are something we avoid like the proverbial plague!

After all these years, we've had our failures, and if a job goes bad we'll take care of it if there's any likelihood it was our fault.  Often enough, we'll redo a job even if it's obvious the instrument was mistreated.

Very much like Frank here as well.  We have a 100% satisfaction guarantee that is presented as if the client is not thrilled.... the client does not pay.

Now I know in advance that this is going to be problematic for some folks and I would respectfully submit that I don't care.

Our guarantee is not in writing and never will be either.....  We fully intend to honor the guarantee with zero push back provided that we have the opportunity to make our case.  After that if the client is not happy they don't pay - period.

No one has ever taken us up on this yet and we have been offering this guarantee as standard fare for the past couple thousand instruments that we have worked on.

Here is the important part.  What some may call cherry picking in determining which jobs one wishes to take in we call good business.  We will never attempt to be all things to all folks and if we do not believe that we can make a client happy they are either 1) referred to someone else or 2) provided with a "punitive quote" engineered to discourage or 3) on a good day Hesh has been known to personally show people the door....

I used to work for GE and neutron Jack Welch... and job one at GE was NOT making money....  Instead job one at GE was shielding the organization from liability.....  Job two was making money....;)  When I was at GE we were the biggest company in human history... and as such every single slip and fall artist, bring your own cockroach sort was attempting to play us for a quick payout....  I learned very fast that folks would even impersonate being a prospect for our wares with very different nefarious objectives really in mind.

Anyway no need for us to put the guarantee in writing and it will be honored if it is ever requested to be so but only after all parties have the opportunity to present themselves clearly and well.  Our reputation is FAR more important to us than the proceeds from one repair job and that's what we keep our eyes on as the prize.

At the risk of being pedantic guarantees, customer service, sales and marketing is something that I am no stranger to and even taught these subjects to thousands of professionals.  My personal belief based on professional experience and lots of it... with customer service is that jobs should not be taken in with out the following elements:

1)  a defined beginning

2)  a defined definition of success and when the job is done

3)  all necessary elements are available to us right now meaning if you want us to install a part that you procure please bring it with you when you drop off your instrument.  You won't see a sign saying "dead instrument storage" at our place and attribution to Quentin Tarantino for the term but not the exact wording nor would I ever speak like that....

Lastly if we were to back up a minute and explore why warranties and guarantees may come into play I think that this would be most important in the context of this discussion.

Expectations are everything.... and setting expectations properly, honestly and up front is always key to having positive client interactions.  It's been my experience that folks who set expectations clearly usually do far better than those who do not set expectations well.  This also requires some communication and people skills but nothing out of the ordinary IMO.

When clients know what to expect in advance they are rarely surprised if the service provider meets or exceeds the stated expectations.

And really, really lastly we bend over backwards every single day to exceed expectations be it delivering early, noticing things not caught in the triage and simply addressing them at no charge, or what ever "human" thing we can do to help our clients be thrilled with dealing with us.  It's not been uncommon for some tears to be shed in our shop and not because of the bill either...  Just last week a woman who had her 1967 G*bson 12 string restored and handed back to her to play for the first time in 30 years could not have been happier.  I also found a newspaper article in the bowels of the instrument all wadded up about the G*bson factory and dated around the time that she had purchased the guitar.  That was presented to her as well now in good shape and flattened out.  She was thrilled.

We were rewarded with one of the very best performances of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah that I had ever heard and by the end of the tune she was not the only one balling her eyes out.....  Oh well...

Customers can be wonderful to deal with and great fun too but it's always a good idea to set expectations honestly and correctly, define and let boundaries be known, never attempt to be all things to all folks if you cannot honestly make it so, and most of all have fun because that's exactly why I am a Luthier - to have fun and enjoy what I do and the people that I do it for.

My long-standing rule of thumb has been:  The customer will be happy, or there's no charge. Period.  

Now sometimes, if a customer isn't happy, it's because he/she doesn't understand the limitations of the work, such as "the action is still poor because you need a neck reset that you don't want to pay-for".   Or "the frets have been dressed as low as they can go and now you need to have the guitar refretted". 

I think that, 99% of the time, if you can explain the reality of a repair well-enough, the customer will not only "get it" but they're thankful because they've learned something in the process.  

Yeah, I've lost some money and some business over time, but that's a small price to pay for the folks who like what they get and are willing to pay for it. 

Once the customer accepts the work and pays for it, it is carried around, transported by various methods, dropped, sat upon, subjected to changes in temperature and humidity, and played with various degrees of force. Pretty hard to warrant a guitar under these circumstances even if the repair was made using skill and adhering to best practices.

All true Robbie and kind of sort of goes with the territory too IMHO.  

We had one recently that was in for a fret dress and when the client picked it up he complained a few days later that his pots are noisy.  We explained that his pots were never touched but because of our warranty we are willing to try to help out with the pots too, even at our expense....  Although this is completely unfair to us we view our role as taking the long view and trying, hard as it is sometimes.... to keep our eyes on being solution providers and not the sorts who's job description says push the broom to the yellow line, lever touch it, never beyond it....

On balance it works out and over time everyone is happy.  I'm also reminded of the folks who take in their car for new tires and then make the claim that it runs like crap and the tire store must have had something to do with it.  Or, since I just had hernia surgery..., I go in for hernia surgery but then a month later complain to my doc that my personality still sucks....:)  

Humans...... sheesh! :)

This is one of the aspects of being in the Service industry that everyone has to learn to deal with. I learned pretty quickly that, as a computer tech, doing anything at all to a system usually assigns a type of "ownership" of the system for the next month or so. Anything else that might happen during that period would often earn me a phone call to correct something I broke when I was there. Explaining that I didn't touch anything to do with the new problem is useless at that point.

A large part of this is that having our "stuff" worked on automatically makes us more aware of how the "stuff" works afterword. We notice all kinds of little things we just ignored before and assume that it's "new". The "obvious" cause must be the last person to "touch" the "stuff", so someone gets the "ownership" call. 

The interesting thing is that it's often pretty easy to recognize what may trigger such a call when I'm working on the original issue. Sometimes I could short circuit potential "ownership calls" by making adjustments/repairs on them while I was there but sometimes correcting it before it was noticed would, itself, trigger the call anyway because I "changed" something. 

Most people understand what I call the "magic box effect" once I explain it, which boils down to my view of a PC is a set of discrete parts and processes which work together but are easily separated when I'm working on the system, while the client sees a monolithic "magic box" which has three states; (1) on and working, (2) on and not working, (3) off.

I understand that my actions earlier had nothing to do with the new issue but they only see the box "not working" and, thinking the problem is "new", assume it's related to what I did before. There is a natural reluctance  for them to be too understanding if I try to explain the "magic box effect" when it may be seen as an excuse to charge them for more work so the result is that I usually ended up explaining it while I was fixing the problem they thought I caused for free.  

It's all just part of the being in a Service business. 

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