|
| I agree with you 100% about warranty claims. If the autosteer system or tire or whatever is IN warranty then the dealer needs to take care of it. Once the warranty is out the world is an entirely different place. My comments are about OUT of warranty systems only. Sorry if I didn't make that clear at the start.
>>>>>Then you've obviously not dropped several G's into an autosteer system.
WRONG The first GPS system I purchased cost $43,000.00, it was L1, and only provided lightbar guidance. I know what it feels like to make a huge investment in technology. I know what it feels like to have an investment that if it fails or doesn't prove to be reliable it will financially ruin you. At the time I bought the first system my annual revenues were $100,000. Did you spend half of your gross revenues on your autosteer? Bet not. I also know what it feels like to have no product support available for that equipment. After that investment it would routinely take 2 to 3 days for an answer to my questions. I've been in a much worse situation than where you are. The difference was I had to make the investment work. So what can you do, you suck it up and educate yourself. I took a lot of lumps from the school of hard knocks those first two years. I learned about things that I would have said I couldn't comprehend before I started down this road. Do I feel compelled to give away that education? No, I paid for that with my blood (from opening boxes and fixing failed boards), sweat(from working on that beast every spare minute of the day) and tears (when it looked like I was going to lose everything because of that one purchase). I stuck it out, and made a success of the deal. If the situation was reversed I'm betting you'd feel the same as I. I'm happy to share what I've learned in the appropriate situation. When people call me 10 years after making a $4500 investment and expect me to answer a question for the umpteenth time I feel used. It particularly upsets me when I know the answer is in the manual and they are to lazy to go look it up. My attitude goes downhill in a hurry when someone calls me at midnight or five in the morning with this type of question. Am I entitled to a life outside of work or is it expected that I am on call 24/7? My experience has been everyone wants the 24/7 deal and an 800 number to call. So not only is it expected that I will give away my education for free, but I will pay for the phone call to give that away. Is that fair? I don't necessarily think charging customers for a 20 second phone call is right. But how to you motivate people to accept responsibility for their actions? To me the service contract is aimed at weeding out the "Call the support guy I don't want to bother looking for the manual" type of calls. And I think charging them is very fair.
>>>>>>I would bet they also didn't just "pull some number from thin air" when they priced these systems either.
The dealers are caught in the middle of this deal, the market/manufacturers/competition set the list price. The manufacturers set the discount level or wholesale pricing. So in the end the dealers that you say "have priced accordingly" are not in control of their monetary share of the transaction. When the dealer has hundreds of systems out working there are a TON of support calls some reasonable and some that are not. Reasonable or not it costs the dealer to handle them and there has to be a cash stream to cover those costs. In a perfect world they would be allocated to the original sale, but how is that done when the calls are still coming 10 years later? Where does the cash come from to hire additional help when the number of calls exceeds current staffing? These are all part of growing a business and it's something that every dealer struggles with.
I've said this in other posts under this topic but maybe not here. My original intent was to challenge the customers perception that support was never-ending and free. I wanted to try to provide a dealers perspective for the customers to see so there could be a productive, mutually beneficial debate about how to deal with this. From the comments on this topic it's obvious that is not going to happen. I'm sorry I stirred this hornets nest. My assumption was the market was starting to mature and some of the conventional wisdom could be changed. Guess not. | |
|
GPS "Service" Contract?
