Back in the late nineties I had an Olympus 35mm point and shoot camera which I’d taken with me on holiday to Morocco. Sadly, it broke down during that trip, although I was at least able to pick up a disposable camera to meet the rest of my holiday needs.
On returning to London I discovered that Olympus’s repair centre was somewhere near the Barbican. The camera was well out of guarantee, so I took it along one lunchtime to see what it’d cost to be fixed. It wasn’t a terribly expensive camera, so being the way of these things, replacement is often cheaper than repair.
At the service centre, a technician came to the desk, took the camera, and said he’d back in a minute. I stood there waiting for about five minutes wondering what kind of bill I’d be facing. He returned with the camera saying he’d fixed it, and there’d be no charge.
I left there delighted. Now I’m sure it was a terribly simple fix, but it was great customer service.
And because it’s so very easy to moan about customer service I thought I’d highlight some excellent service I’ve received this week.
I have a Sony A700 DSLR camera. The other weekend it broke down. I’d experienced a couple of intermittant errors with it, but it seemed a bit more permament now. I dug out the receipt for the camera and guess what? It was just under three weeks out of guarantee!
The following day I phoned Sony UK and explained my predicament. The friendly operator took some details, and said I should write to them with the original receipt. In the meantime he also gave me details of where to send the camera. I boxed it up and nervously posted it off to the freepost address.
A couple of days later I received a text. They’d received my camera and said it’d take five working days to repair. They sent me an email saying a similar thing.
A week passed and I was wondering when they were going to hit me with the cost. Sony had quoted a fixed price online of £114 + VAT for camera repairs although the operator I’d spoken to said they’d take into account how close I’d been to the end of my guarantee. I thought that they might – if I was lucky – knock half the price off.
I heard nothing until yesterday when the camera arrived back – unannounced. It was fixed, and there was no charge.
That’s what I call great customer service. I was technically outside the guarantee period, but still got the camera fixed and returned to me in very short order.
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Note for the purposes of Google searches. My A700 was showing “Camera error” having also displayed some very wayward auto-focussing issues immediately prior to that. It seems to be similar to the problem this person had. It was intermittant at first before finally locking up fully and being unusable. Let’s hope it doesn’t return like it did for him!