Is ‘customer service’ replacing ‘quality control’ ?

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ZEN.45

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Is ‘customer service’ replacing ‘quality control’ ?

I usually buy used (or even very old) guns … so it’s not something I’ve been confronted with but I’ve noticed in many threads people praising a gun manufacturer for their ‘customer service’.
I often read something like this: “ I bought gun Model X from brand Y and it had problem Z, BUT the ‘customer service’ from Y was great and now it’s fine ”. Personally I would be ranting about Y’s lousy ‘quality control’ rather than praising their ‘customer service’.

I’m wondering if there are ‘bean counters’ at some of these companies who decided it was cheaper to provide good ‘customer service’ on X% of their sales than to provide good ‘quality control’ on 100% of their production.
 
Obviously this is just personal opinion, but I would say no they probably did not make a conscious decision to increase Customer Service and cut back on Quality Control. Keep in mind that the cost of repairing a defective unit after it leaves the factory is much more than if they caught the problem during manufacture. Also, the impact on perceived quality of the overall company is high.

I suspect the phenomenon you have noticed is based on two issues. First, here in the states gun sales are booming :D and many manufactures are struggling to keep up and sometimes their quality has slipped. Secondly, many companies have come to understand the importance of Customer Service and have invested more resources to improve the experience.
 
I've said before that I don't want to hear about customer service at gun companies. I want to hear "I have no idea, never needed to send one in." The OCCASIONAL story (as a percentage) is just fine but some companies (it seems) have as many customer service stories on the web as they do guns on the market. Eventually, I have to ask not whether or not the service has a good reputation but why it is so often used so as to earn said reputation.
 
My wife is a quality and reliability engineer who should be ABD by January. She could document that making a reliable, quality product is financially better for the manufacturer than is making cheap products, incurring warranty costs, and losing customers in the process.
 
Don't forget they also have customer service for us knuckleheads that break things, or decide we know what we are doing and don't bother to read the intructions.

But you are right, customer service should never replace quality, only enchance it.
 
Interesting thread as I just encountered this myself. I was left thinking "wow, they took good care of me". I have a semi auto shot gun (11-87) that I had two problems with over the 5 years of owning it. I called the manufacturer on a long shot hoping they would fix it. I sent it in and they sent me a new gun. I was happy to have the problem resolved, but was also thinking well, if the gun hadn't had so many problems, I wouldn't have had to rely on customer service in the first place... Like the other poster said, I don't think they decided to turn out crap guns, but it does help when they resolve the issues at hand.
 
I think that the OP has it right. For too many corporations the focus is on customer service rather than making sure that the customers never need service in the first place.

Guns are simple. The tooling and technology used to make them is not new or groundbreaking. The engineering is well understood. There is no excuse for poorly functioning new firearms. If your new gun from XYZ Corp fails in some way and they next day air a replacement to you it STILL IS A FAILURE.

In the corporate world today customer service planning and training all too often focuses on convincing the customer that they aren't angry at a failed product or service. The training doesn't focus on solving or preventing the failure, it focuses on ''managing" the customers feelings.

In my opinion this is a pay me now or pay me later scenario. Yes, it is probably cheaper in the long run to build quality product that doesn't fail and then require "customer service". But this requires an initial outlay of funds for engineering, tooling testing and quality control. "Customer Service" on the backend gets paid for on the backend, after you've already collected your customers money. Nearly all businesses will choose the customer service route over the quality control route given the choice. Especially publicly held corps that have to report financial results and outlooks.
 
I think you're on to something. As guns get more popular, they figure the owner will just send it back to the factory rather than spend time making it right the first time.

I'd rather have the factory put a couple mags through a brand new gun and give it to me dirty than something spotless with machining burrs that haven't been removed.

Example. My Kahr K9 is a great gun and functions well, but the rear sight was loose after the first mag. The gun shop attempted to tighten it up but still drifted over a week later. I know Kahr will take care of the issue but is it worth all the hassle of sending it in?
 
Taurus is a good example. They keep touting improvements in customer service, but I've never heard a whisper from them that they're actually doing anything about quality control.
 
Keep in mind that the cost of repairing a defective unit after it leaves the factory is much more than if they caught the problem during manufacture
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The Japanese learned that philosophy from an American - Charles Deming - when the US companies didn't care about quality - and this was right after WWII, so your "older" guns fell into that realm as well for the most part. He preached designing the quality in from the beginning so there would be no need for QA/QC on the back end, and the cost would be lower. Suddenly, Japanese products went from being known as "Jap Crap" to the best ranked quality products in the world

If more US companies did that with their retail products, it would be a great thing
 
But there is also something called statistical process control.
Which I think amounts to: "We can afford to pay one gunsmith easier than two inspectors and a pallet a month of testifire ammunition."

When the cost of warranty repairs exceeds that of a serious improvement in quality, they will make the change. Not before.

Also consider that the vast majority of the guns they sell are adequate. People don't post on the internet about adequate.
They may post about better than expected.
They will usually post about unsatisfactory.
 
I think what has happened at too many companies is that there is a split-a chasm, or an abyss-between manufacturing and management, too many companies have top managers who don't even know where the plants are, let alone visiting them, have no idea of how the company's products are made, and are too mesmerized by flow charts, financial statements, are themselves "quantifaction quacks" who maintain if the numbers come out right then everything's fine. And don't even buy or use the company's products.
 
Also consider that the vast majority of the guns they sell are adequate. People don't post on the internet about adequate.
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Many gun buyers buy one, and only one, gun in their life. They might shoot it once, and they might not. In any case, it ends up in the sock drawer after that.

Those are the same folks for whom price is the primary factor. Provided the gun works the one time they shoot it, they don't have any further feedback to give. It's those of us who shoot them regularly who see what works and what doesn't.

As such, a company that cuts corners can report that the majority of their products are reliable. After all, they only get complaints on, say, 1% of their products.

I submit that we're more likely to hear about failures with higher-end firearms than we are about cheap ones because folks who shoot a lot tend to avoid the cheaper firearms.
 
There are companies out there whose business model is to build product with a seemingly high failure rate. They plan to just replace it on fail rather than repair. If all goes according to plan all is well. But if they can't sell enough volume or prices fall then they are forced to start cutting corners. Then they don't want to send you a replacement in a timely manner, if at all. Then the customer service complaining starts.

That would be one business model. But until someone comes up with a disposable gun I think it's a bad fit for the firearms industry.
 
But until someone comes up with a disposable gun I think it's a bad fit for the firearms industry.
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That would be a HiPoint.

Their model is a cheap hand gun that breaks a lot that they keep running for you for free. They wait until you get tired of sending it in to get fixed and then it disappears. Since I won't buy a car like that why would I buy a gun like that?
 
My wife is a quality and reliability engineer who should be ABD by January. She could document that making a reliable, quality product is financially better for the manufacturer than is making cheap products, incurring warranty costs, and losing customers in the process.
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I'm sure she's right, cambeul41; I'm also sure the people who watch quarterly profits with extremely close eyes would tell us otherwise, and unfortunately, the bean counters won a long time ago.

I learned as a boy it's easier to avoid problems than solve them; that, too, was a long time ago. Talking points have triumphed over knowledge and reason.
 
You know, I tend to buy quality make guns from companies that have great customer service like S&W, Ruger and Springfield. While my Ruger was recalled, I've never had to use customer service for problems with any of my guns.

By comparison, I bought a Taurus M85 that seized up at 200 rounds. Taurus customer service wasn't very good at all.

That of course isn't a wide range of all gun makers, but at least in my experience, some gun makers don't sacrifice quality or customer service. Others seem to do both and I'd guess there are a lot that do one or the other.
 
"I usually buy used (or even very old) guns"

You could very well be buying guns that were sent back for repair 50 or 70 years ago when they were new. They've always made some duds that had to be returned.
 
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