Soundmatters, great customer service

With my share of poor customer service experiences (most recent is my upcoming cancelling my BofA credit card next month, but won’t both going into that one, just more “we don’t need you as a customer” behavior), I had another exceptional story to tell. This time with Soundmatters. I’d had a Soundmatters MAINstage HD for a couple years (Jan ’06). It worked great, nice unobtrusive companion to my plasma, good sound, especially nice with the subwoofer as movies actually had some bass impact. Not huge dedicated “home theater” sound, with full surround, etc, but for the “den”, it was perfect.

Well, last Thursday, the sound didn’t come on when I unmuted the speaker. I changed inputs, and the sound crackled back on. Humm. Gotta keep an eye on that. That night, no sound. Tried unplugging, replugging, etc. Nothing, and in fact, a power reset made most of the lights on the front blink quickly. Constantly. OK, must be dead.

We moved to the “movie room” to watch the movie we’d settled in to watch, and I sent a note at 7pm to Soundmatters asking about repairs. Well, 15 minutes later I get a response that told me repairs weren’t cost effective, but they’d get me an out of warranty exchange for $75! I gave them specifics, at 8am I had an exchange number and instructions for how to get them payment. Gave them a call (this was Friday), and they told me they’d process it and try to get it out Monday. By 2pm Friday, I had a tracking number from UPS, with a delivery date of Tuesday! So, 3 working days for the exchange. I sent mail at night on Thursday, 3 days later I’ll get the exchange, send the old one back in the box they’re mailing the exchange in.

So, a rousing round of applause for Soundmatters. What a great example of exceptional timeliness and reasonable fees for customers. I was thinking about a new speaker for mounting the plasma on the wall in a different room cleanly, I’m now going to put their new SLIMstage speaker at the top of my list!

Aug 04 2008