Great customer service experience today with Etymotic Research.
I have a pair of Etymotic ER-4S’s. These are incredible headphones that are designed to be inserted deeply into the ear canal, giving you 20-25 dB of noise isolation. Unlike noise cancelling headphones, the isolation is accomplished physically, not by injecting a phase-reversed signal, so you get noise reduction across the frequency spectrum, not just at the high-end, and you don’t mess with your music to get it.
Anyway, I have custom-made plugs for my ER-4S’s, which make the ‘phones extremely comfortable and provides better isolation to boot. A few weeks ago, the stem of one of the ER-4S’s broke off inside the custom plug, due to some pretty rough handling on my part.
I put off sending the headphones in, mostly because I was so busy. When I finally got around to sending them in, I had less than a week before I left for Tokyo. I threw them in a box and sent them off with a quick note.
Two days later, I got a call from the Etymotic tech, letting me know that he’d received my ‘phones and had already repaired the stem. He also noticed that the custom plugs had been drilled out wrong, which was putting pressure on the earphones and had probably caused the stem to break in the first place. Despite the fact that Etymotic hadn’t manufactured the custom plugs, he offered to make a mold from my plugs and make a new set that were drilled out correctly.
To make a long story short, I had my earphones back in time for the 14-hour plane trip to Tokyo with standard plugs and Etymotic says I will have my new custom plugs in a week or two.
Total cost to me: $0. Etymotic Research rocks!
Posted by pmk at November 18, 2003 9:04 PM | TrackBack