Upon re-reading the Mothership’s pitch for this service, I see that they did NOT promise that you’d speak with an engineer: “The Shopsmith Engineering Team is lead by our Shopsmith Engineer, a leading Quality Assurance Professional And 40+ Year Shopsmith Veteran. If his team can't help, it's likely nobody can.” But I know that some of the folks here have indeed spoken directly with Jim McCann directly in the past. So I am guilty of jumping to a conclusion. A very bad habit for an engineer!RFGuy wrote:Yeah, I agree with your assessment, but do you think they will have an engineer fielding these calls at Shopsmith? I kind of doubt it. All they need is someone with a bit of mechanical inclination that is well versed on the product and/or its documentation to field 95% of these technical support calls. If they had an engineer on staff they would need to be moving a lot more product and/or charging an exorbitant rate on the phone support to make it work financially.BuckeyeDennis wrote:Well guys, just how do you think that Shopsmith is supposed to stay in business giving away service for decades-old equipment? At $80 per hour for the first 15 minutes, and $60 per hour thereafter, they’re barely breaking even on an engineer’s salary, once you add benefits and overhead.
I used to run a small capital-equipment manufacturer. Some customers are wonderful. Others may be nice, but they’ll call tech support for every little thing, regardless of how much you invested in documenting that exact issue in your manuals. Until they have to pay for it, anyway.
The manufacturer basically has five options:
1) Give away continuing customer service, betting that the resulting goodwill will generate sufficient new-product growth to recover the customer-service investment. This can actually work in the early stages of a company life-cycle, but not in the later stages.
2) Charge for out-of warranty service time, as ShopSmith is now offering to do.
3) Charge huge markups on spare parts, to subsidize the labor costs. As Shopsmith has been doing for some time. (But this doesn’t work for commodity parts — that just PO’s the customers)
4) Don’t offer sufficient service to your customers, and suffer the predictable impact on new-product sales. As we’ve seen from ShopSmith in the recent past.
5) Go broke.
Of those options, only 2 & 3 are viable in the long term. Given a choice, I actually prefer #2. It more closely aligns costs and value-added. A wealthy customer can get his hand held, no problem. A frugal customer can, with a little more work, get his answers elsewhere, such as right here. Without increasing Shopsmith’s operating expenses.
When I called Carter for support, I was amazed to get transferred to an engineer to speak to on the phone. Similarly, when I contacted Incra with questions about their products, I traded emails with an engineer there. Both great companies, but I am betting most manufacturing related companies particularly in the woodworking realm can't afford to have their engineer(s) that are on staff do front line technical support with customers.
RF Guy