Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Garmin - A Great Customer Service Experience

Many of us complain about bad customer service experiences. Seems to me that such posts makes up a significant portion of all blog posts worldwide (See Cranky Customer for a "good" repository of such rants).

In counterpoint, I thought I'd write briefly about a very good experience I had with customer service. So here goes...

I bought myself a remanufactured Garmin Nuvi 260W GPS last week from eCost.com. Tried it out, works great (I highly recommend Garmin's GPS products, BTW). But I realized that the map data was out of date.

So I went to the Garmin web site and logged in to my account there looking for a newer version. Found one, but the site wanted to charge me $69.99 for it.

That led to the customer service interaction.

On Monday, I submitted a support message as follows:

Form Message


Knowledge Job Ticket: {02be9f40-5f6b-11de-ea2e-000000000000}
Subject: Getting map updates
Message Body: Hello, I just purchased a Garmin 260W (remanufactured unit). The current maps are not completely up to date, and I was hoping to be able to receive a current set of maps as part of my initial setup. However, it is telling me that I need to pay $69.99 to receive a map update. Considering that I just bought the unit last week, it seems unfair to have to pay to have maps that are current as of the time I bought it. Can you provide me with a way to get a current set of updates?

Next day (Tuesday) I received the following response:

Dear Samuel Kamens,

Thank you for contacting Garmin International.


I would be happy to help you with this matter. Please forward me a copy of your receipt for validation of your purchase date. You can either email it to me as an attachment to a reply email, or you can fax it to me at 913-440-8280 (fax) Att: ********* (OCC). If you chose to fax it, please make sure to put your name, address, phone number, username, brief description of the problem, and serial number on the GPS device that you want to update. Once I have received that information, I will work on getting your account corrected if need be.

Thank you.

I responded with a copy of the receipt, as requested, and today (Wednesday) I got this:


Dear Samuel Kamens,

Thank you for contacting Garmin International.


Thank you for forwarding that information to me. I have put in a request for a map update to be placed onto your account. Please allow 2-4 hours for this request to be processed. You will find the map update on the main page of your My Garmin account, and be prompted to activate the download.

Thank you.

When I got to the office at 9 am and logged in to my account, the map update was waiting for me. Downloaded it, and away we go!

The folks at Garmin could have said "Sorry, but we can't upgrade your maps. The ones you have were current when the device was manufactured". And I would have lived with that, since it's not that hard to get around even with old ones. But instead, they responded quickly and positively.

Hence this post.

Thanks, Garmin!

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