(news & commentary)
NPS members in Canada received an email today that indicates that all service centers in Canada except for the one in Mississauga, Ontario, are going to be closed. Service in Richmond, BC, and Montreal, Quebec, will be discontinued.
Welcome to Nikon cost cutting, round 237.
Thing is, Nikon is already an opaque, unapproachable-by-customer organization in many parts of the world. It seems their plan is to double down on that. Here in the US, we used to have seven-day-a-week telephone support from Nikon, but we’re now down to five days a week with shorter hours, from 9am to 8pm EST.
How far will this go? I don’t know, but the trend line is going the wrong direction. Eventually Nikon will have the customer support reputation of Comcast they way they’re headed. (For those of you outside the US just Google “Worst Customer Support.”) Maybe Nikon executives should read this Chinese Study: “The results show that [a] non-financial measure, customer satisfaction, is significantly associated with contemporary and future financial performance.”
Simple, really: unhappy customers tend to stop buying.
Let me point out: I identified customer support as a key weakness of Nikon almost two decades ago and have consistently advocated that they fix that ever since. The run-up of digital camera sales allowed them to basically ignore that problem. The run-down of digital camera sales now has them cost cutting and making the problem worse.
Now perhaps the additional service centers in Canada should be closed, that they’re inefficient uses of Nikon’s resources. The question still is what I just wrote: customer support is something of a Nikon weakness, so what is Nikon (Canada and elsewhere) doing to fix that? I’ll be perfectly happy to report that if and when I hear something. Until then, I can only report what there is to report.
