GEC #15 What should I do?

knifeswapper said:
Again, let's look at the facts; and be optimistic in our assumptions. If he sent an email "5 days ago" on 10/8, then he sent it on the Friday before a week long FACTORY SHUTDOWN wherein a skeleton crew is coming in for cleanup and maintenance. I would not assume that part of this shutdown was to power up the computers and respond to emails; matter of fact I have a couple emails that have gone un-answered thus far this week as well.
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Any small business that sets up a scenario in which it is impossible to properly take care of their customers is making a big mistake. As I said before, no matter what's happening at the factory there's no excuse for not taking 5 minutes to answer emails. I'm going to give GEC the benefit of the doubt and assume that there's another issue at play and that they didn't intentionally decide to ignore their customers this week. I've moved businesses to entirely new locations without any lapse in communications. Their customers would never have known that they had moved aside from a new address. If they intentionally made the decision to not respond to correspondence this week it would be very disappointing to find out that they also decided to not contact people who had knives awaiting repair, as well as vendors, last Friday to let them know that they'd be unreachable.

knifeswapper said:
I don't see a promise broken.
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navihawk said:
I too have a knife with them for repair. I was told it would be done or looked at in a week. When I inquired again, Chris said they couldn't look at it for two weeks. After two weeks I sent another email asking if I could get it back for the fifteenth. Chris said they are on shutdown Monday and Tuesday and they are working on repairs now, but it wont ship until the fifteenth.
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Sounds like two broken promises with the customer having to initiate contact to even find out that the promises were broken.

I'm not trying to bash GEC. Like I said, I've had great CS experiences with them. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. However, saying that it's acceptable to ignore a customer's problems in order to take care of your own problems is not a good way to run a business in a market that has the low profit margins that we keep hearing about in the knife industry. I understand that things happen. I also understand that the company has to look out for it's bottom line above all else, otherwise none of us are going to be able to enjoy their great knives. However, if they implemented a system where they receive a knife, do a quick search in their system for any correspondence where they might have promised a turnaround time, marked the tube with the date that the knife was promised to ship back out, and then checked the knives that they have sitting for repairs regularly and contacted people to let them know when the dates were going to be missed it would avoid these situations. It would also add probably 10 minutes of work each week. I'm assuming that they have some kind of similar system in place and that these few cases we hear about slipped through the cracks. No customer service department is going to get things right 100% of the time no matter how big the company is. The majority that has good experiences are never going to share them because there's nothing really to talk about. Nobody is going to start a thread that says "I sent a knife to GEC for repair and got it back when they said I would." I'm assuming that that's how 99% of the stories would read.

When you look at the big picture, it's a small negative for a company that has a lot of positives. On the other side, when you're making a purchasing decision and you're buying online, customer service becomes a much larger issue. There is no physical location for many people to go to in order to get issues resolved. There has to be a certain level of trust that issues will be resolved via electronic communications. In my shopping for slipjoints I contacted GEC and another manufacturer. GEC responded immediately and the other manufacturer still hasn't responded. I own several GEC knives and will probably never own a knife from the other manufacturer. The same went for dealers. I have contacted four GEC dealers. Two responded immediately and two still have not responded. The two that responded have both gotten orders from me, the two that didn't probably never will. This means that I have to miss out on some SFOs that those dealers are involved in, but if I'm being ignored when I'm holding a fistful of cash how can I trust them to take care of me when I come bearing problems? Would you find it acceptable to walk into a retail store with a return and have the employees ignore you because they had other business to take care of? Of course not. A better analogy would be if a manufacturer had a table at a knife show and a customer walked up with a knife that they wanted the representatives to look at and they were told that they'd have to wait off to the side because the manufacturer was there to focus on selling more knives, not take care of issues with knives that have already sold. There's no way that anybody would claim that this is acceptable. Just because somebody is on the other end of an email or phone line instead of standing in front of you doesn't mean that it's OK to fail to provide customer service.
 
I understand what you are saying. And an in-depth process seems like the best solution for everyone; and I myself am like you and cannot stand loose ends. I want any outstanding issues off my desk as soon as possible. But I also know what the industry standard (at least in PA) has become; and we are asking one factory to do something outside the industry standard. But I expect you are correct in that the silent majority here have positive things to say about GEC's customer service, as haphazard as it seems.

But, if and only if, GEC has strung these good folks along with promises of a date that they would have their knife back and then with no communication missed their date - they have failed the customer. I just hope the solution is not the generally accepted one to send a postcard upon arrival and then you get your knife back when you get it; as to avoid getting negative press on the online forums for the small percentage that weren't satisfied.

I have never had Chris volunteer me a date when my knives would be worked on. I have pressed her and she has give me a time frame, always with a caveat of some kind. They are a small company with one or two folks that do this work and they are heavily integrated into the production line. Whether any of this is the correct way to do it or not; that is the way they have always done it. I don't like it sometimes - customers don't like it sometimes - but that doesn't mean we draw/quarter them all of a sudden when they didn't know any big problems existed. Now they will know a new methodology must be put in place; and then we can gripe about that one :D

The great thing about BF is that we don't all have to see things the same or agree on issues. But we can look at these things from different angles - knowing that the odds are against any one viewpoint being completely correct.
 
Just talked to Chris for a few minutes. Asked her to check her email and she said she has NO request or inquiry that has gone unanswered unless it was lost in transit.

She said they did have a backup on warranty work, but Navihawk was right (and I was wrong) and they had the repair desk working the second part of this week. As soon as the hafting crew comes in on Monday they will do the finish work and EVERY knife they have received for warranty work *SHOULD* go out next week.

This is not to insinuate that they should not improve the process. But it was their understanding that they had responded to every inquiry and would be caught up on warranty work this coming week.
 
knifeswapper said:
and then we can gripe about that one :D
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That certainly seems to be the case more often than not. You make a good point about another possibility for resolving this. A lot of companies would rather avoid the issue altogether by not even hinting at when they might get to your problem. Alternatively, they can quote you a 2 month lead time which would be very easy for them to hit and probably result in less knives being sent in for minor issues. This makes things much more simple on their end, but much more nerve wracking on the customer's end. We should not take for granted that they are attempting to estimate when the knives might be gotten to and not jump down their throats too bad when that date is missed. I've been on the other end of this and know that all too often an estimated date can come across or be interpreted by the customer as a promised date. The 99 times you deliver ahead of schedule you never hear about it again, but the one time you fall behind you get called into a meeting. :grumpy:

Another thing to consider is that they're a pretty young company, only being in existence 7 years or so. Most companies don't find the level of success that GEC has that early on. There are going to be growing pains. There are going to be times where they have to make decisions to try to balance fulfilling demand, keeping costs down, maintaining quality and supporting customers, and with only 7 years under their belt I'm sure they're still tweaking these equations. Heck, there are companies that have been around for decades that are still trying to figure this out. I don't think that anybody would be happy if GEC announced that they were going to cut back production or lower their standards in order to better support repair issues. Or worse yet, announced that they'd have to increase prices or charge a fee for repairs.

OP, please keep us updated. I'm interested to hear about the time frame and results of their fix.
 
knifeswapper said:
But it was their understanding that they had responded to every inquiry and would be caught up on warranty work this coming week.
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Awesome news. This is what I was hoping to hear. They had a plan and a couple knives fell through the cracks. That's going to happen now and then. It sucks when it happens to you, but it's unavoidable. Nobody's perfect.
 
Cory Hess said:
On the other side, when you're making a purchasing decision and you're buying online, customer service becomes a much larger issue. There is no physical location for many people to go to in order to get issues resolved. There has to be a certain level of trust that issues will be resolved via electronic communications. In my shopping for slipjoints I contacted GEC and another manufacturer. GEC responded immediately and the other manufacturer still hasn't responded. I own several GEC knives and will probably never own a knife from the other manufacturer. The same went for dealers. I have contacted four GEC dealers. Two responded immediately and two still have not responded. The two that responded have both gotten orders from me, the two that didn't probably never will. This means that I have to miss out on some SFOs that those dealers are involved in, but if I'm being ignored when I'm holding a fistful of cash how can I trust them to take care of me when I come bearing problems?
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In the last few months I have had two occurrences wherein as many business associates ignored an inquiry I sent them.

The first one I called up (mad as a hornet) asking why I can't get the courtesy of a response? While on the phone he looked thru his inbox and then his trash and then his spam filter - wallah. My email got sucked up in the spam filter because of links and pictures in the body. As he apologized and I was cooling down, he read the email then responded "well I didn't get this email in the first place; but if I had I would still have ignored it"! He explained why and we both laughed about it.

The second one, having learned nothing, I called up aggravated. He said "I replied to you as soon as I received the question". It was in my spam folder! Having a business with an associated email address all over the internet you can image how many spam emails you get daily. Not to mention the forms from the website that get every kind of solicitation you can imagine. So I spend more money than most on filters and authentication. But the down side is that they have to be continually fine tuned and checked. Even my phone system delivers messages left via email; and my filters sometimes decide that those are spam.

The moral to this story is that in an age where electronic communication is the majority of our interaction we became too reliant on them and our infrastructure. Don't assume that because the factory or the two dealers didn't respond they don't value you opinion or your business. Give them another call and talk to a human being. They may be a jerk too, but then at least you know for sure. Since you mention SFO I will just say that if I ever failed to respond I can only offer my sincere apology.

Customer Service takes a certain personality, of which I do not have. But between watching folks that excel at it and a few insights given me by my Father, I am improving slowly but surely. My wife still walks by every once in a while and says "what you should have said was...". She now makes me answer the phone "CollectorKnives, how can I help you", when the customer called CollectorKnives and the system has already identified itself twice as CollectorKnives. To me it seems silly for me to have to answer "CollectorKnives"; but I guess she heard me say more than once to the person on the other end, "Yes, this is CollectorKnives".
 
In hind site my post was probably pretty harsh. You make good points. I work in IT and constantly have to explain to people that computers aren't infallible, yet I assume that they will be for me. :o

To clarify, I don't hold bad feelings towards the people that didn't respond to me. I do assume that I fell through the cracks of an otherwise good company. However, when one person was "chasing me down" to make sure I'm satisfied and another didn't respond at all there hasn't been much reason to go back to the person that missed me the first time. In my case it was a matter of being very happy with the people I did interact with and not needing to go elsewhere anymore. I mingled that up in my post with what other people reported and came back with a twisted post that probably misrepresented everybody. I'm good at that kind of thing. :foot:
 
I think everyone on this forum wants the best for GEC to prosper. My only gripe was how long the turnaround was on warranty. Communication with Chris was on the up. I brought up my case in hopes of constructive criticism.
 
I think GEC has a great turnaround time. Try waiting a year. True story. Chill out, you will get your knife back. This isn't Benchmade or Spyderco.
 
I had a fine experience with GEC warranty. Try calling. Sometimes it's just easier to talk with someone directly. I agree with Cory that it only takes a couple minutes to respond to an email but at the same time you have many emails coming in at all different times of the day and night and you turn your head and this order needs to go out and this machine just broke and the Blade Forum Knuts want their Club knife etc etc LOL. So I can understand how things might get backed up.

Oh and Mike your not so bad. You've talked me off the cliff a couple times now. LOL. I always laugh after I send an email about "issues". But seriously imagine for a moment being the recipient of all these sort of uptight scrutinizing emails. It would likely drive me up the wall. just poking fun (at myself included)
 
I have nothing but good things to say about GEC's customer service. I sent one knife (an 85 bullet end jack) back because the blade was striking the spring when I closed it. They fixed it up and had it back to me in about three weeks.

I think that's pretty good, since the only time I ever sent a knife back to Case, they had it for 6 weeks... to re-glue a shield that had fallen out.

GEC pins their shields... ;)
 
Good Morning Joseph,

Sorry, we were on shut down last week and I have not seen any of your e-mails although we have upgraded our computer system and they may have gotten lost. Your knife is finished and will leave today via US Mail. Sorry for the delay.

Chris
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On 10/14/2014 5:27 PM, Joseph Cahill wrote:

I have not heard any news on the knife. I have received no response to the last two emails I sent. It is approaching a month of having the knife in your possession.

Joseph Cahill
SAMSUNG Galaxy S5



Looks like I should have this back this weekend or on Monday..
 
Got the knife back today. It still has some blade play but not as bad as it initially was. I don't see why they couldn't eliminate it all.
 
ALLHSS said:
The reason is that they have less than 30 employees. They just finished the biggest run of knives they have ever done. I doubt they get enough complaints/returned knives to justify the considerable extra cost of a dedicated repair/warranty employee, and that cost would be covered by increasing the prices of the knives.

I guarantee they will fix your knife to your liking, it's unfortunate that its taking longer than normal.
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Still, you'd think they'd place some kind priority on knives they've already sold vs just waiting for their assemblers to have idle time while awaiting parts. Customer service is customer service regardless of whether there's a dedicated shop for it.



joeC76 said:
Got the knife back today. It still has some blade play but not as bad as it initially was. I don't see why they couldn't eliminate it all.
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uuggghhh
 
joeC76 said:
I think the dealers should also examine the knives before selling them. I had 2 that I purchased on an auction site that both had terrible blade play. The other one I received in after I had been waiting on the knife I sent in so I looked around and found a way to remedy it myself. I stopped the play, but now the knife has no snap when it closes, so I have to guide it shut.. In the long run, that will probably work it's way out since I use my knives and over time it should loosen up (or I would think). I haven't heard back from GEC yet, when I do get the knife back I will let you all know. Kinda miss this one since it was my first and only wood handled knife
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If it helps, I sent one in in early september, and just received it back from GEC today. They did a perfect job of the repair. I am very pleased and satisfied. Be patient, and when your knife arrives, I feel sure you will be very happy. If I were you, I'd email Chris again, and see if you can get an update on the progress of the knife repair. She was very good about keeping me in the loop when I asked.
 
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