Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the age of customer service is dead. It's just not been buried yet and, the sooner it is, the better - because then we can stop wasting our time trying to get through.
Let me give an esoteric example. I am an amateur musician - I play in a band and, occasionally, we punish drinkers in a pub by playing loud rock covers at them. I play the piano but, since pianos are not easily portable, I use 1988's finest keyboard, the mighty Korg M1. You may never have heard of it but you will have heard one as they are all over popular music of the late 80s and most of the 90s like a nasty black and white synthetic rash. Even if you don't like that music and never choose to listen to it, you'll have heard it in a restaurant, in a lift or, perhaps, while on hold trying to get through to a customer services department.
It has the usual keys to hit and also thirty-five control buttons. Eighteen years after I bought it, the keys were all working just fine, good as new, lithe, frisky and responsive as the day they rolled out of the factory. Unfortunately, the buttons were becoming arthritic and, in a fit of pique, I managed to push one of them all the way into the casing while wondering whether it just needed a little more encouragement.
After two and half years of having no idea how to get it repaired, I suddenly had a brainwave and thought of contacting the manufacturer. Conveniently based only forty miles from home, they estimated a repair bill of about £70 and so, up the motorway I went.
For reasons that still escape me, there was no way to make an appointment for same-day repair and so, some days after dropping off the instrument, the estimate arrived in the post. £120. Hmm. Not very much like £70 but there would be a £40 charge for providing the estimate if I didn't want the work done. The phrase 'over a barrel' came to mind. Having accepted the price, they sprang into action for the two hours' work and the machine was duly returned a week and a half later completely unplayable.
True - they had repaired the buttons. However, they had also completely erased the contents of the memory banks which, it turns out, use cutting-edge 1980s technology and so need a battery to remember how to do things like, er, sound like a piano. Presumably Bob Scratchet in the workshop had disconnected everything when replacing the buttons and didn't bother doing anything like, well, switching it on and checking it was okay before sending it back.
At this point, they started ignoring me completely. Two emails brought nothing but electronic silence and so I had to fix it myself. And since I had to reload it anyway (as the memory banks were already blank), I thought I'd replace the eighteen-year-old battery beforehand. Despite a promise on their website that instructions on battery replacement will be emailed out on request, they didn't because they were ignoring me.
In the 1980s, the idea of anything as groundbreaking as a user-replaceable battery was obviously frowned upon and so the little watch-battery is located on the back of the second circuit board from the bottom. (It seems that this idea of not letting people change batteries themselves is not yet dead as Apple are currently using it as a form of extortion on their iPod buying customers. And as for watch manufacturers - if Swatch can put an easy-to-remove cover on a thirty-quid watch that's waterproof to a depth of about three million miles, what excuse does anyone else have?)
Fortunately the instructions are available elsewhere on the internet (and thank you to Google for finding and indexing them). Incidentally, while changing the battery, I noticed that one of the circuit boards was held in by five, rather than six, screws. And, after reassembling the unit, I suddenly worked out what the loose-screw-like rattling sound was. Thanks again to Bob Scratchet for his sterling work.
Having finished this, I then had to buy a fancy cable to connect the M1 to my computer - a cable which I had never needed before and, in all likelihood, will never need again. And finally, after downloading the data and trying a few rubbish freeware products which didn't appear to do anything, I finally found software that could squirt the information back into its rightful place.
To summarise, Korg could have charged me ten or twenty quid to replace the battery. (Price in Timpson's - £4. Price if bought in bulk on the web - 70p. Potential mark-up for Korg - £19.30 for about thirty seconds work, given that the machine was in pieces in their workshop anyway. That works out at £2316 per hour.) They could have followed good practice and reloaded the machine so that it was useable on return - that might have taken another couple of minutes but, frankly, ought to have been included in the twenty quid for the new battery so I'm not going to allow a theoretical extra charge. I would then have thought, "Oh, what a great service centre! They worked out the battery was about to go and changed it for me at such a bargain rate."
Instead, they did none of those things and now I think they're quite rubbish. Incidentally, the keys of the Korg M1 are actually made by Yamaha - something I would never have known if I hadn't disassembled the unit myself. In other words, the bit that still works wonderfully is made by someone else.
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