Stories I like to tell:

I once ordered a custom couch for nearly $2000. The day after delivery, I noticed that a substructure in the back of the couch was damaged by the shipper. It was beneith the leather so was not visible nor functionally defective. The store didn't ask me to take pictures or proof otherwise of my claim. As the furniture was custom manufactured to my specs, they appologized for the shipper's damage and offered to allow me the use of the damaged couch until the replacement arrived.

I ordered my Mini header from a well respected vendor of this site. He told me to send him a check after I got the part. He did the same for the following throttle body I ordered.

I received a defective computer monitor from an internet vendor. Upon calling them, they appologized for the inconvinience and gave me a call tag number. They also told me that they would immediately send out a replacement BEFORE recieving the return as not to inconvinience me any further.

The moral of these stories: I still and will always do business with these companies. I also go WAY out of my way to promote them to my friends and aquaintances. Bad business practice? I think they're doing pretty good considering they've got me and other satisfied customers free promotion.

 

Simple, you were forcing the customer to pay for your mistake by forcing him to pay for shipping!! Then you give him such guff in this online forum, misquoting the situation to make Alta look better. Do you disagree with the original offer on the table of him paying for 2nd day air? Do you disagree with the $20.00 credit to allow the customer to procur aluminum welding? Gesh, even "American Chopper" acknowledged in one of their episodes that aluminum welding is a very difficult skill to aquire and not all welders can do it, hence the premium cost.

Your responses sicken me to no end.

Gesh, even when I had my $300 dollar digital camera repaired they paid shipping ways! And all of this over a $1000 part? All of this over a 10 minute repair!

Think about this. In the time you've spent crafting up and typing your responses, you could have gone down to your company's shipping department, boxed up a brand new intercooler for this person. Then filled out a fed-ex slip, called their 800 number for pickup. While waiting for pickup you could have then filled out a return form with your account so your customer could have returned the defective unit. Think about it. You've wasted more of your time and tarnished the image of the company you work for by sitting there behind your keyboard instead of getting up and taking a short walk down to your shipping dept.

 

Hey...That's what I said in my first rant about the sprayer head debate

 

I can see good points on both sides. Here is how we deal with returns, in case it helps provide ideas.

We offer a 1-year warranty from the date of purchase. When a customer contacts us with a report that one of our products isn't functioning correctly, we point them toward online resources and troubleshoot over the phone or email. If that doesn't fix the problem, we APOLIGIZE and provide the customer with an RMA number to send the part back to us. They pay shipping to us via a trackable method and we pay shipping back to them using the same speed of service (ground, overnight, etc). If they send it via Pony Express, we return it via Pony Express.

If the customer states they will be inconvenienced by the delay in returning the product, we offer to send the replacement immediately, if they give us a credit card number so we can pre-authorize a charge for the product amount. By pre-authorizing the charge and insisting on trackable shipping methods, both the vendor and the customer are protected. As soon as we get the return, the charge authorization is cancelled and the money has never left the customer's account.

The above may not be applicable to every situation, but for our product line ($229-$899) it has worked out extremely well. Just my $0.02.

 

I agree 100% with that way of handling returns/exchanges. The only reason I believe ALTA didnt offer to send a replacement right away is because they probably dont have any replacements to send.

 

Just briefly:

We get chastised for not answering complaints. We now get chastised for spending time to defend our position and give another side to the story. Hard to win. (Even though we aren't trying to "win". We want to earn a happy customer base here.)

We did offer to pay shipping charges both ways. Call tag would take additional time. He would have been welcome to use our shipper number for the return. Again HE CHOSE TO HAVE IT REPAIRED INSTEAD! We offered what is a very reasonable amount of money for the repair instead. Again HE CHOSE TO REPAIR IT!

This would have cost him nothing other than the loss of time and frustration. For that we of course apologize.

Adam
ALTA Performance

 

You have the EXACT same return policy and procedure as we do. THANK YOU THANK YOU for your .02. It was worth much more than that to me!

Adam
ALTA Performance

 

This is probably a mistake, but I'm going to jump in here anyway...

Was the part defect from the start? Yes
Did Alta acknowledge this? Yes
Alta's initial response regarding the return of the part was substandard, BUT they changed and decided to in fact pay for shipping both ways. Which is in line with how most manufacturers handle defective parts...

The customer knew Alta was only willing to give him $20 if he went to local shop, and Alta warned him of the risks. He did it anyway. The customer could have and SHOULD have asked for an estimate before turning the part over. That way he would have known up front if it would cost more than the $20 offer. That way he could have gone to Alta BEFORE he laid out the money, and advised Alta of the situation. He didn't do that, he also has some responsibility here.

Alta is absolutely right, there's no reason for them to pay for overnight shipping on this part. Just because the customer wants this for a trip isn't Alta's responsibility or problem, neither is how far the customer drove for the part. What could have been done, and should have been done is the original part should have been reinstalled, and the defective one returned to Alta at their expense, trip or no trip. And Alta offered to do that. That Alta ended up willing to pay for 2nd day air is above and beyond what they had to do.

There hasn't been to much talk about what the reseller did in this situation. However, from what it sounds like, the customer should be very happy that they didn't take the Best Buy approach that "Open Box means As Is" in which case he would have no recourse at all with them.

Legally, Alta has covered their bases here. They offered to take the item back and they offered to repair the item, and neither option would have left the customer with an undrivable car. Legally there is no reason for Alta to refund the money AND let the customer keep the part...

As for Msfitoy's problem. Adam I suggest Alta start doing what Gateway does in this situation. Ship the replacement part with a call tag, take the customer's credit card number and advise them that they will not be charged provided that the defective part is returned to you within 7 business days of the replacement part's delivery. Give the customer an extra 2 days to be nice, and if you do have to charge the customer, promptly refund the money if the part ever shows up.

 

Just so we're absolutely clear on this point...

Perhaps there's some missed communications going on, but in my conversation with Jeff yesterday about returning the unit for repair, I offered to overnight the unit to Alta at my expense, and suggested that if you could repair the unit and return it to me via overnight freight so it would arrive here Thursday, in time for my trip, things would be great. I thought that was a fair offer... we were sharing the "pain"... and a one-way overnight freight bill would have probably cost you less than a round-trip two-day in any case. Except that Jeff never offered to pay freight of any sort (maybe he meant to offer it)... his only comment relative to freight was that Alta wasn't paying for overnight freight, period. And shame on me... at that point I might have just offered to pay overnight freight both ways just to get it done... but it didn't occur to me.

To take a step even further back, Jeff said new units would not be available for a few weeks! There was absolutely no mention of them being available today (Wednesday). Had there been, I would have immediately suggested that I would pay the overnight freight to get a replacement here Thursday... and life would have been even more wonderful.


You are correct... I did know that the sprayer hose kit wasn't there. Terry said it hadn't been shipped with the unit (not hard to believe in hindsight, considering what did get put in the box), and would be replaced . Fair enough, I didn't plan to install it right now anyway. I've got no idea how you ship these things... I just called the closest Alta dealer (listed on your web site), he said he had one in stock, I went to buy it. So I suppose I might have a beef with Terry if he knew or suspected that the unit was defective (and that did cross my mind). Guess it's the naive customer's fault again... sigh.


I did however call first thing yesterday (Tuesday) morning and try to reach you. Left a voicemail, never got a call back. I finally called Alta back later and got Jeff on the phone.

I do agree that any more discussion on this matter is pretty pointless. What happened, happened. The repaired unit is on the car, and hopefully it will last a long time. I invested a lot of time and money... much more than I should have, and probably learned a lesson or two. Alta will reimburse me for the repair or they won't, they'll provide some level of warranty support for the repaired unit or they won't... I've got no control over that. If anyone at Alta wants to discuss it further, they've got my number, and they'll call me. NAM forum readers will draw their own conclusions, and do whatever they think is right for them.

Dan

 

After reading this thread I am almost (but not quite) speachless.


1. A $1,000 low volume hand fabricated part is not 100% tested. Shame.

2. To allow this type of public intercourse to occur on a customer service issue is unbelievable.

3. The fact that the customer is even considering replacing this part amazes me.

Alta, how many dollars do you think this transaction has cost you?

I sure wish that I was producing an aftermarket intercooler.

 

Wow! I just experienced great customer service! I just got off the phone with iRotors in CA. I had ordered directional (curved cooling vains) slotted rotors. While the slotting is directional and correct they accidently started off with two left hand blanks. After reading them the part numbers off the edge of each rotor, they appolgized big time. They did some checking and called back in less than 10 minutes. They said I will have a new right hand rotor by Friday and that they have scheduled UPS to pick up the extra rotor next Tuesday at no cost whatsoever to me. I thought it was pretty cool that I will have the correct rotor before the wrong one even leaves my house! At a total cost of 169 for a pair of rotors and the weight and shiping costs involved, I believe they decided customer service is more important than the profit on this particular sale.

 

Just to back up our position on the sprayer MFSITOY situation. We offered exactly that! He felt we should send the replacement first, and wait patiently for him to return the defective part. He and ALTA will always have a differing opinion. But thanks!

Adam
ALTA Performance

 

Call ME! I got a message yesterday on my voice mail at the same time I transferred your new call (keep in mind we are West Coast and we open the phone lines at 10am) to Jeff in the warranty dept. Returning the call at that point seemed irrelivant as he was handling the call. In hindsight I should have taken the call from Jeff and handled it personally. A now obvious mis-communication occured between Jeff and yourself about the shipping of the return. I will get your number from Jeff after this post and call you personally. As before our apologies for the problem ever occuring.

Terry Sayther fully admits (to me) that the item missing from your part was shipped with it and lost. Probably with the original box now MIA as well.

We will pay the amount for the dual direction 2nd Day Air charges we would have otherwise incurred to repair and ship the item to you.

Chat with you then!

Adam
ALTA Performance

 

And thus we have this debate. The customer spends big dollors and asks for a small favor to fix a small problem not of his own making. Instead, the customer is expected to be patient instead of the vendor. Ok...I still don't get it

 

This is not (what we feel) to be a low volume part. We sell more than 75 of these every month. One in 75 is still unacceptable by our standards.

This public "intercourse" is exactly what these forums are for. Am I wrong?

We feel that this has allowed us an opportunity to explain and defend this part and our customer service to this forum base better than had been before. Do you think Andy@RossTech has lost business for his public explanation of the exact same return/replacement/repair policy? We want and need feedback positive or negative to further improve our customer service and products.

Adam
ALTA Performance

 

The major domestic auto companies have determined that their success is being undermind by being too good at rules and processes but not enough awareness placed towards the customer. Perception is everything in the consumer purchase decision today. I dare to wager that if a poll were to be taken by your potential customers on this forum, you would not do so well. Just my 02.

 

Was that your initial offer? I seem to recall him stating ALTA had told him he had to pay shipping to get the part back to Orygun and then Alta'd pay for shipping back. If this was your first offer, it was not communicated well enough to your customer...

 

75 intercoolers a month? how many on this forum have one?...let's see, if the readership here represents 10% of the intercooler market, forum members would be picking up 7 or 8 of these babies per month. so for the past 3 months, there ought to be 20-24 sales to forum members.


any member reports lauding Alta's product and service record for intercoolers?

 

75 intercoolers a month, thats interesting

 

And I would imagine this site has more than 10% of MINI owners that are heavily into modding.

 

The 75 / month figure may be the total number of intercoolers Alta sells (MINI + Subaru)

 

ALTA INTERCOOLER

Have had an Alta intercooler for several months -
and it works just fine! They are wonderful people
to work with . . . and will always do the right thing!

 

I've had mine for many months and it works fine too. I think Adams a nice guy too...he hasn't told me to take a hike or blamed me for anything...but what's the right thing?

That IS the heart of this debate

 

That was my first thought also....

 

What is this about a GSR Intercooler?

Details...