@stuartv you are saying, because price is good: or you can understand everything from their website, otherwise move to a more priced brand that can offer a customer service?
I'm not sure if this is the way a business has to follow, but I'm just a likely customer who is looking to buy a drysuit.
probably I'm not a so clever scuba diver as the one who bought a seaskin nova without any hesitation.
I feel as I have to beg to get answer even for what asked about few doubts got after read deeply their Website, but probably I'm the customer you describe below:
anyway a drysuit is made to last more than few years and during this relationship with my drysuit and myself, I would like to have a support just incase.
if I need to beg for answer even for the first made contact by the filled form on website, mmmm..it makes me worry about what can happen next.
for me 1000 usd is not a peanut but money earned with hard work. that's why i wanna be sure to make the right purchase.
Okay, first, let me just be clear that
@BoltSnap and I are friends and we like to tease each other. Especially on this subject, where we disagree, perhaps, on what drysuit to buy. What may appear to others as us having real friction is just us engaging in friendly banter.
In this case, I was attempting to rib him by suggesting that he is just a pain in the butt customer that should stick with a vendor that charges a premium but will hold his hand all the way through the process. It was just friendly teasing - though I understand it might not have appeared that way to someone who doesn't know us or our underlying friendship.
Second, there is a nugget of truth in what I said and you said. Seaskin simply does not (as far as I know) invest in the manpower to have people manning phones and answering emails with the same responsiveness that a company like O'Three appears to do.
Also, I think Seaskin was hit hard by COVID, just like many companies everywhere. I believe they shut the whole factory down for a period, at one point. I think that contributed to the issues I reported early in this thread and also to issues other people have posted about. They simply haven't had the people available to respond to customers even at their usual level.
And when you compare that to reports of customer service from O'Three that are based on pre-COVID interactions, it really makes it look like Seaskin is unresponsive (if you ignore the COVID factor).
@stuartv reading you post I can see we are different customer
Emailed about this issue on April 2020 you got fixed on 2021,
you sent email without reply from the repair manager…
mid may 2020 No reply at all…
October 2020 with the second boot issue. New email..but not reply at all.
December 2020 after you use the contact form on website they replied.
What if instead of small leak was another issue that could not make you dive with this drysuit?
I don’t want to enter in the dispute if..they have or not to charge for repair and/or shipping cost a faulty couple of boots from a new dry suit
here the main leak is not from boots but from communication
Don't get me wrong. I agree that it would be much nicer if an email to their manager got a prompt response and things got taken care of. But, there are two factors that make me feel okay about how my experience went. One, April and May 2020 were right in the thick of when COVID was crushing everyone. And, two, the instructions were there on their website and I didn't follow them (at first). As I have said, all in all, I am very satisfied with how it all turned out. I have 2 drysuits. If the one with leaking boots had been my only suit, I would have put more effort into getting a resolution more quickly. But, as you can see from my timeline of when I emailed them, I wasn't making it a high priority.
Further, the only reason I spent the exorbitant money to send it to them, instead of just getting it fixed in the US was that I expected it to be covered under warranty AND I really wanted them to replace the boots with their Tech boots, if they did indeed do a warranty replacement of the original boots.
If the suit were such that I couldn't dive it, and I NEEDED it, I would have just gotten it fixed here in the US. The possibility that I would end up paying to get something fixed that should have been right from the factory or that should have been covered by the factory as a warranty repair is a potential cost that I factored into my buying equation when I ordered my first suit from them.
In other words, I took a gamble in ordering a suit mail order from overseas and I knew it. So, I went in with the expectation that I might have to spend more money to get it "right" before all was said and done. And I took the gamble because I was confident that even if that happened, I'd still have spent less money than if I bought from someone that was rated as "better".
Or, what I'd say to anyone, Seaskin is a good quality suit at a budget price. If you have an issue, don't expect it to be handled the same way as if you'd spent 3 or 4 times as much money. That is an unreasonable expectation. You haven't paid for that level of service and you should not have an expectation that you will get it.
On the other hand, you SHOULD expect to get what you ordered and to have warranty issues (if you have any) taken care of per the terms and conditions posted on their website. And, as far as I know, Seaskin does that. I'm the only person I can think of, just off the top of my head, that has even reported having an issue that needed to be fixed under warranty.
www.diverightinscuba.com
