How well and how long do you support your customers?
Maybe you give them a few years for a given version of your product, perhaps 5+ years for products with long-term support?
What about industries that need support for longer? For example, it’s easy to buy parts for 10 or even 20-year-old cars. But what about decades of support?
Or even a century? There are indeed industries where this matters, where 100+ year old systems and machinery are used every day. For example, last I knew, the Crane Paper Company, who makes the paper for U.S. currency, uses 100-year old paper-making machines, old-style.
I have two stories of great long-term customer service. And a short bonus item.
A Needle Loom
The first involved a factory machine, a needle loom, made about 1967, using a very old-fashioned eddy-current clutch drive system. Along about 1992, I was re-engineering and updating this machine’s control system, and needed some information about the motor controller’s wiring and operational modes.
The original drive had been modified a few times and the machine itself installed in at least two factories that I know of, with vital details lost, adjusted, or changed along the way.
A bit lost, I somehow found and called the original drive system manufacturer, who had long since been bought by another larger firm. In those pre-Internet days, I found a phone number and after a couple of phone transfers, finally connected to a guy who could help me.
He asked me the model and serial numbers, and answered a couple basic questions I had, and then said, “I have the original system diagrams & engineering manual, would you like me to send you one ?”.
Of course, I would, and a few days later, a large manila envelope arrived for me. With the original manual, diagrams, and other info I needed. For a 25-year-old-year-old system that was nearly obsolete the day it was built.
Who keeps original manuals on decades-old systems? This company does, because customers like me need these things, on machines built before we were born.
Allen Bradley Controller
The second story is even better and while I was not personally involved, members of my team were, in another nearby factory.
It seems an old and large machine’s main motor controller, an Allen-Bradley size 5–6 starter, failed. The coil burned out in this nearly refrigerator-sized unit, which happens from time-to-time. So they just needed a new coil.
The only problem was, the unit was built in the 1930s or ’40s, if I remember correctly — probably 50+ years old. In a perfect world, they would just buy a new one for many thousands of dollars and replace it.
But newer units would not fit in the rather custom mounting arrangement required by this machine, and re-engineering it was too time-consuming, as this part of the factory was down until this important machine could be fixed.
So a call was placed to Allen-Bradley, in business since 1903, to discuss their options.
And Allen-Bradley said, “We don’t stock replacement units that old and large, but we can make you a new coil from the original drawings and coil winder settings, which we keep for exactly this purpose. It’ll take a few days.”
Next Monday and a few thousand dollars later, a new coil arrived, which fit in, wired up, and worked like a charm, right out of the box. On a 50+ year old absurdly obsolete product built before WWII. I was astounded.
This is real customer service, providing parts and manuals for decades into the future, for customers who pay premium prices in part for exactly this type of service long after the purchasing engineers have retired.
An Old Pump
Finally, I just heard of another example of even longer service. The story, as appeared on Twitter from well-known investor Paul Graham, is:
“Some friends needed maintenance done on a pump on their farm. They called the company that had installed it, and they came and fixed it. It was installed in 1850.”
That’s a company installing a pump 170 years ago and coming along today for some maintenance. Turns out this is common for UK-based Green & Carter as every pump they've made in more than 200 years is guaranteed FOREVER - they say most pumps installed before 1800 are still working, and they stock parts for them.
Your Service?
Perhaps you can think about how you can provide better service levels, worthy of customers for a quarter-century, half-century, century, or more.
Businesses need to remember their ultimate purpose and value to society is not simply to make a profit for themselves, but to provide useful/valuable goods and services in the context of a long-term relationship with customers they serve.