Phil
577
Service and Support Thoughts
I'd like to start a thread on your experiences and comments on service polices of the watch companies. This is not intended to be Patek specific, but in general to the watch industry. (My experience with many brands, in fact, have found Patek to be one of the most accessible, and thatis before being involved with this forum.)
The bigger issue is why the watch companies that can charge tens of thousands of dollars for a single don't always have the service and support policies to match. Now granted, these products are just a few of a kind and and are not mass produced. But there are things that could be done to ease the difficulty in dealing with these problems.
A few things come to mind like better communications (letting the owner know exactly what is going on, what was found, etc.), adding a year to the warranty, sending a book, providing a loaner watch, and offering other means of compensating for the inconvenience. If a problem does occur there is nothing a company can do more for its own goodwill than to turn that disappointment into a positive experience.
When I ran a company that made a consumer product we always replaced it with a new one if there was a defect. We wouldn't even wait for the original to be returned, we'd ship it out Fedex the same day we received the call with the problem. People were amazed that we trusted them to return the defective unit, but my response was these people trusted us to buy our product and deserved to be treated in kind. Granted this is not possible with fine watches, but there certainly could be some imaginative solutions given to dealing with these problems.
What do you think?