Another Shearwater Service Thread

[Diving Dubai]

Suunto simply takes the path of least resistance in their handling of these issues.

Suunto does (and mostly rightly) get a kicking for poor customer service. However If I may, I'll recount a personal story which shows the opposite:

My Eon went into self dive mode. It was 3 years old and approaching 400 dives. My wife's of a similar age and similar number of dives was fine.

MY first action was to give it a really good clean (incase I'd got salt deposits causing a problem) and then a full reset.

No luck. believing it to be the obvious (a pressure sensor) I contacted Suunto (via an inside route I have)

I also sent a video of both my and my wife's computers in water At 20C and then 35C representing out water temps, and showed the difference in pressure readings (her's read a constant 0, mine varied up to 1.7 m depending on temp and the water was only 20cm deep.

There was some back and forth emails over the course of 2 days, because on teh Eon Suunto had moved to a much higher quality sensor and were not convinced of my diagnosis - I wasn't really prepared to send my machine to Finland because I dive frequently.

Long story short, I requested they change teh sensor at mu cost (out of warranty) and they authorised my local centre to so

When I picked up the computer 2 days later, I had a request to dive it and check it before I paid. Unusual but I did that week.

When I went back a few days later to pay, I was just asked to sign a form saying the computer was satisfactory. I was told there was no charge. The sensor had already gone back to Finland.

Sometimes they do give good customer service

 

[Shearwater]

My concern in my previous posts was that Shearwater would follow Suunto's lead with this attitude. I can fully understand and respect Suunto's stance in this but their computers are cheap. A Shearwater is not.

R..

Hi, Rob. We cannot comment on the policies of our competitors. However, the NERD 2 pressure sensor re-work and its resolution is an example that could give you an idea of how Shearwater would approach a more widespread problem with sensors drifting if this were ever to appear.

The self-diving behaviour you describe in our computers is often related to a drift on the pressure sensors. We are very interested in collecting data from this kind of malfunctions because it tells us what is the best way to deal with these problems, and more importantly, how to be proactive in preventing these from spreading. We analyze the type of depth sensor malfunction to gather insights that will help us build a better product. Is it due to a one-off defective sensor or is it something different? Do we need to modify firmware code to calibrate differently or would these calibrations mask a hardware malfunction from a batch of defective sensors?

We will continue to make every effort to ship out products with the least amount of defects possible. We do realize divers rely on us to supply dive information crucial to their well being in an accurate way. We take this very seriously and strive every day to rise up to the challenge.

Cheers

 

[The Chairman]

and a word-of-mouth system

Uh: word of internet. No one understands that better than Shearwater.

We will continue

How I would love to hit "like" a number of times on this post.