Grand Seiko wrote: ↑Tue Aug 08, 2023 4:00 pm
NigelS wrote: ↑Tue Aug 08, 2023 9:03 am
Could delays - and some quality issues - be because CW have achieved a very laudable 300% growth in turnover in the last four years, but have only increased staffing levels by 30%?? Everyone's working their butts off back at base!
As far as I can tell, CW is not a watch maker, they are a design shop and marketing entity.
The issue has been described as strong demand, challenges with manufacturing/quality in general, time required for third parties to hire and train additional staff
Perhaps some of the pressure is being caused by CW not having the right/enough people to oversee their vendors.
What I don't like the most in this is the continuous barrage of email marketing coming from CW.
I have no interest in their other products.
I just want CW to focus on getting the nice folks here, their watches.
Spytap provided a very clear snapshot of his buyer circumstance (very much resonated with me) and it does not reflect well on CW.
The “barrage of email marketing” is is something I want to put a bullet on.
As a recap, I ordered by BC in December, was given a June delivery date in January, was told “The manufacturing process of your Bel Canto will commence in March with assembly, QC and final regulation happening in May”, and then heard nothing until I emailed in mid-May and was told “it’s still on track for June.” The second to last day in June, I was told “Sorry, we’re not able to make the original date. Stand by for an updated delivery date.” Which turned out to be October, four months delayed from the date that six weeks earlier I was told wouldn’t be a problem.
There is no way they didn’t know they weren’t going to hit that June delivery date until June 29th. Especially with the timeline of production they laid out. They likely already knew back in May when I emailed that June was out of the question. But they did launch several big watches around then. So I’m/we’re getting a continual set of marketing emails about new products, new products, buy this, check this out, we’re so proud of this brand new thing - but the thing from (now) nine months ago you put money on…well, we can’t deliver that. But rest assured - put more money into these new things, and that’ll be a different experience,
promise.
It really does feel like no one is considering the actual
customer experience over there, just the
sales experience. I’ve worked in areas where complicated expectations need to be managed and met, and this just isn’t how I would handle this. It looks *really really bad* to obviously hold back on negative news so it doesn’t affect your shiny new news. It looks like you’re hiding something - because you kind of are. Your existing customers should be informed
first not
last and then goodwill created there, before attempting to market and add new customers.
It’s not just that we weren’t kept in the loop - it’s that we were deliberately left out of the loop (and maybe borderline mislead.) And because of this deficit of information, it appears that it was done so as to not interfere with a new product launch when the prior product launch remains still unfulfilled. There needs to be a higher focus on the customer that extends beyond the marketing and sales of new products, but every new product launch (with an associated huge marketing and release campaign) that happens while we remain waiting in an information vacuum reduces any remaining brand affinity and makes it much, much less likely that we’ll ever become repeat customers - let alone the high-affinity fans who add their own word of mouth recommendations to expand the brand.
