SiliconBeat

Altec-Lansing iM600

In a blog post I made last week, I mentioned my experience with my Altec-Lansing iM600. To recap, the iPod speaker system stopped working with my iPods and iPhones and, because its one-year warranty had expired, Altec-Lansing said it couldn’t do anything about it.

Soon after I published my post, Patrick Beck, Altec Lansing’s marketing manager, e-mailed me about it. This began a long exchange between us about the problems I ran into, both with my speaker system and with Altec-Lansing’s customer service.

As might be expected, Beck assured me that the problem I ran into was unusual, that there were plenty of iM600’s “still going strong” after many years. That’s probably true, of course, but doesn’t mean that others didn’t have the same problems with their machines that I did.

Regardless, Beck did offer some helpful advice and information for other owners of Altec-Lansing products. Namely:

1. Altec-Lansing will extend the warranty of its devices from one year to two if you register your product with the company within 30 days after you buy it. I rarely register my products; now I’m wishing I had registered this particular one.
2. Although Altec-Lansing’s customer service representatives have been trained to strictly enforce the one-year warranty, Beck implied that the company sometimes is more flexible in particular situations. He said that customers essentially wanting to appeal a decision by customer service that a product is out of warranty can contact him.
3. Beck acknowledged that the company needs to provide solutions for customers whose products have failed after the warranty has expired. As I mentioned in my previous post, right now in such cases, customers are out of luck, because Altec-Lansing won’t replace the product, provides no information on where to get it repaired (even at the customer’s cost) and doesn’t sell replacement parts.

“Clearly we need to change our customer service ‘there’s-no-options-tough-luck’ approach,” Beck said.