Mel said:
We had a Powrtouch mover on our previous single axle van. We had the van 4 years. The mover had motor actuated rollers. One of these motors failed twice and was replaced each time. The other failed once and was replaced. The after sales service was excellent with an engineer out within 48 hours each time. However, we did not use the van with great frequency (5 or 6) outings a year. So the balancing factor to the great service is the number of times the unit needed work.
Our new van has a Reich mover, manually actuated, but only used it once so couldn't comment on its reliability
Mel
Hello Mel,
I think your post very poignantly expresses the moral dilemma.
In four years you had three failures. Now if that had happened with most products, people would say "don't touch that model as it's very unreliable". Yet somehow your post suggests you almost forgive the company because it responded so quickly with it's exceptional after sales service.
The reality is you have had three failures, and those failures will have caused you inconvenience, it may have involved some expense, and for some people such a failure could impact on their very precious holiday time or bookings.
Now its all credit to this manufacture they seem to respond so quickly, and puts into sharp relief how dire many other organisations are in dealing with faults and complaints. In that regard it is a model that others should seek to emulate or even improve on.
But the underlying issue is why has this manufacture found it necessary to put such a comprehensive after sales service in place. Because it is not cheap to provide such cover.
Hopefully a major part of the company's strategy recognises how precious working people's holiday time is, and a few days down time can ruin plans and cost some caravaners lost bookings and deposits, so a quick response can minimise possible consequential loss claims. This is an aspect that all organisations involved with holiday time pursuits should be considering.
But cheapest solution which prevents any such issues is ensure their products are fault free from the outset. No Faults - Significantly reduced customer service demands (you will always need some customer support for queries and after sale purchases of consumable items).
It is almost always the case the cost of repairing a product failure in the field cost much more than preventing the fault from leaving or even arising at the manufacturing stage which comes down to proper Quality Assurance management which covers design, procurement, testing, marketing, production and aftermarket services.
Realistically it's not possible to guarantee a 100% faultless product, but with good design, proper manufacturing control, such issues can be driven down to very low levels indeed, and especially when a product is not overly complex (and neither caravans or movers are particularly complex) the need to invest heavily in customer services can be dramatically reduced without impairing the customer's experiences.
With smaller CS overheads and product fewer failures which are a direct drain on profits, companies can review their pricing structures and have some scope to reduce costs and still boost or maintain profitability.
If one manufactures products do fail but they respond very quickly, their reputation seems to be based on the customer service element and that raises their profile. But you must not dismiss other manufacturers who profile is less obvious:-
It could very well be another manufacturer's product is more reliable so it generates less public awareness, principally because it does what is expected and is thus not exceptional enough to generate comment.
It could be another manufacturer's product is equally reliable but its CS is less responsive so it is seen as "what is expected" and generates less public awareness.
However it could also mean:-
It could be another manufacturer's product is less reliable but its CS is less responsive so really poor and customers do avoid its products generates less public awareness because of lower numbers of units sold.
Unfortunately, because of commercial confidence. companies guard their marketing and failure statistics very carefully, so it's not at all easy to make any firm conclusions about the relative performance of these products, but based on the fact that all the units use very similar technologies, its only fair to suggest that each manufacturer's products have roughly similar reliability performance.
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