Fuel on the ole fire

[amw5g]

As I previously wrote, I had a run-in with Aeris service that left me feeling less than rosy. Not the worst retail experience, but enough to reconsider other vendors for my equipment needs. One of the biggest frustrations was lack of communication- email, posting on this board, and using the customer service form from their website resulted in nothing. It appears that the only communication they would acknowledge, from me anyway, was a direct phone call.

So imagine my surprise when I received a solicitation via email to check out their "Black Friday/Cyber Monday" sales. And my even greater surprise when I see the same advertized right here on these very Scubaboards. I gotta say, that takes some chutzpah- no problem using electronic communication for selling, but when it comes to customer service, it's just a giant black hole.

This offends me as a consumer, as a diver, and as a professional direct marketer. Perhaps I'm overly sensitive, how does it sit with you?

-Amw 5G

[sanjac]

I must admit, it doesn't look good when many complaints are brought to the attention of these forums here with no response from Aeris - then they pop up and place an ad in the forums, so we all know they are on-line - yet, still no responses on the issues at hand. I know this forum is an "optional" communications method for Aeris, but if they have their own forum here and they do at least monitor it, one would think there would be some kind of response from them for these issues - especially the general issues of communicating (or should I say attempted communication) with Aeris customer service.

Compare this with the Intova forum - they (based on postings) are very responsive and resolve issues on through these forums. Maybe Aeris is too big to keep up with the personal touch. Maybe Doug is overworked and doesn't have time to respond. Maybe Aeris needs to dedicate more resources to customer service to keep their customer base. From what I've read (all second hand), it seems Aeris does not have a very good after-sales support business model. Most others don't either. But fixing this would not only keep Aeris customers but add those who jump ship from other brands due to poor service from those other companies. Of course, it may be that the number of complaints are minimal (these forums don't usually attract those who are happy, just those who have issues) and it isn't worth the investment in post-sales customer service - either that or they are swamped with issues and can't address them all. I'm rambling - in any case, I agree - the crickets chirping aren't a good sign of Aeris' customer support. I have a T-3 Elite that went out on me. I haven't dared to send it in because I can't dive for a while and I won't be able to really test out whatever they send me as a replacement - not to mention I have no clue which local dive shops are dependable enough to use as the required intermediary (I just moved the the Washington DC area from Guam). Its terrible that we have to wonder about these things. It wasn't that way a long time ago. I think the entire dive industry needs to do a turnaround on dependability and integrity.

Jim