WholeHome

Howdy all,

Just a quick note to let everyone know we are out in force at the Houston Home and Garden show this weekend (Sept 18-20th) Booth #454.

I’m on the show floor now, and while it is a smaller show, there are some quality vendors here and well worth spending a few hours.

Free tickets are available on the show’s website if you print a coupon in advance!!

Stop by – I’m teaching a seminar on Whole-Home entertainment – I’ll be going through switched component video distribution as well as our system and even HD modulation over coax with honorable mentions to Zeevee and AVAtrix. That will be Saturday the 19th at 2pm at the Relaint Center. Everyone who stays awake through the whole thing and then stops by the booth to buy a system will get an extra free remote.

David

This might be the easiest, and at the same time most difficult topic for a company. How to do everything possible to please every customer and make them feel like part of the family. Everyone knows the old addage about pleasing all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time but never all of the people all of the time. I honestly thought that was wrong (I could please everyone all of the time) until this week.

We have always tried to go overboard, if we miss a shipment date/promise, we would do free shipping, throw in an extra remote, or offer some other high value apology. When we do in-home installs for people, we always try to help with any other A/V issues they have, go very conservative on charging, and go overboard on getting things perfect. Essentially we try to treat every home like it was our own.

The problem is that sometimes customers ask for things that, at least, seem unreasonable.  So let me pose this to the community, a hypothetical:

Assume: Corporate policy of 30 days no questions asked return policy and then a 1 year parts and labor warranty against defects. Also assume that for a standard $99 home install, we spend 4 hours in the home, added another $180 worth of accessories to get it all to work right, and made two other in home visits to get it all tweaked perfectly – all at no extra cost to the customer.  (Rare, but every once and a while you run into a home that takes extra time due to wiring, the kinds of TVs with cable cards installed etc.)

Then, 5 months later the customer says they want a refund because they decide they don’t need it. If we offer to make another visit and tune anything they like but cannot offer a full refund on equipment and installation – is that reasonable?

I know it may seem like I’m exposing a soft underbelly of self inspection here, but definitely want to know if the community is responsive to setting a line “somewhere” and asking to stay on this side of it.

Essentially, I’m trying to set the philosophy as something like: Make the customer feel as if they are wrapped in a warm blanket, but don’t expect any funny-business thereunder.

Who is a customer service expert who can lend advice?

Lots of new boxes out there including the Cisco PNG200 (which I’m afraid I slammed a bit a couple posts back) that are using the new XMP protocol – INCLUDING some of the new Motorola HD boxes that Comcast is handing out. In the wake of the “silent launch” a couple of things everyone really should be aware of.

1) XMP is SUPER tight on timing – Uh, but who cares?? – ANYONE who uses a universal remote because most off the shelf equipment is not capable of reading and reproducing those codes. Normal learning remotes reproduce within about 2-5% tolerance. It takes at least 1% to make XMP work. (again, in my humble opinion, stupid on the part of the manufacturer).

2) Two-Way protocols are a nice idea, with higher end remotes, you could get show or song info on your remote, you could get new IR codes loaded into your remote and other cool whiz-bang ideas but think about that for a second. You are sitting on the couch and want to change the channel – you pick up the remote and briefly point it at the TV, sometimes not even long enough for the TV to see the code thrown at it and you have to try again. Now consider that to get any kind of meaningful data you would have to consciously point the remote at your set top box for long periods of time to get data back 10, 20, 30 seconds or more.. Remeber the old “loading the program on your apple or TI home computer from casette tape?” Yeah I think you get my point.

3) Good news – Motorola figured out how bad this would all be and made their box “dual code capable” – at least the one I got will process both the new XMP protocol (the grey Comcast remotes) as well as the traditional learnable codes (Silver Comcast remotes). BIG thank-you to Mot.

Looking for thoughts and opinions on XMP and how it applies to how you use home entertainment. Anyone want to share?