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Warning: db-R customer service

40K views 286 replies 64 participants last post by  loosescrew 
#1 · (Edited)
Not exactly a review per say, but an example of the customer service you can potentially expect from dB-r Electronics...

I edited out the reference numbers and customer name from the preceeding posts. I felt it wasn't my place to include his personal details. He is a member here and can comment if he wishes to.






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#3 ·
Shouldnt matter if he sent is a 5 dollar amp or a 1000 dollar amp. That company gets paid to fix whatever is sent to them. The fact that it took them almost 3 months to basically say they had not done anything and then try to belittle the sender is crazy. We basically know what this company thinks about its customers. Could anyone really expect quality work from someone that would respond to a customer like that when they were in fact wrong?
 
#4 ·
Sorry, we don't guarantee to be nice. If we would have finished his amp it would have worked perfectly this is not even the issue, we do the best work and everyone knows this, but no, sorry we aren't the nicest, never promised to be. Don't like it take it somewhere else, it's that simple. We never kiss ass here, never expect it. Want your amp repaired right, if it is something we work on, we will always do it right or won't do it at all, if you want us to be super nice to you and meet deadlines etc, sorry, we just can't always do that.
 
#9 ·
Is this a Joke? I hope it is!

You Don't Ass Kiss?

What kind of Business are you running?:confused::confused:

You do the best work??? :rolleyes: No you don't!!!!!!

You're amps are Flea Market Garbage... and it's quite obvious you're Customer service, and Business practices are even worse than the product you sell!

I have never seen a Business treat someone with this kind of ignorance, and disrespect in my life. Frankly, I find it absolutely disgusting.

I can't even believe that you actually have the Gall, to come on here and act this way.

This forum is frequently visited by top level representatives from Companies such as Alpine, JL Audio, Arc Audio, Soundstream, JBL, HAT. Just to name a few.. Some of these companies are 100X the size of you're's and their Customer service is 1000% better.

FYI, a Business is nothing with Customer service, maybe if you treated people with respect.. You would generate enough revenue to make a product worth buying.

You have given yourself a Black eye throughout the Car Audio Community, Top to bottom.

All Members shall bow their heads now, and have a moment of silence for you're ignorance, and stupidity!!

I am now nauseous and cannot type anymore.
 
#5 ·
4 months to repair an amp? You really need to hire more help...and or be upfront about the wait time.

It's not about asskissing...it's about providing good customer service. You had an amp for 4 months and hadn't touched it. You could have at least offered some sort of discount as an apology for you dragging your ass on getting the amp fixed/or not being upfront with the customer on how long it would take to fix the amp.
 
#6 ·
No, re-read, he was asking was it received on July 15th, he started the ticket a long time ago, took him a while to send it in, we started work on it but we were out of parts then had helpers out in the hospital etc. He got pissy with me and we don't do that here, I don't have to put up with it and will not. That's the end of the story, if someone doesn't want to do business with us because we just tell it like it is, are not super nice, and can't always meet a deadline, but always do good work, that is fine, they can take it to the other repair shops out there and find out what a good "__cking" is. They don't repair the amps right (the other shops, you all know who they are) and they take 6 months to a year, LOL, we get new customers all the time who are coming from the other shops out there that simply don't do good work, and they are not nice either, so at least if we aren't nice, at least we do good work LOL.
 
#7 ·
Thats sad. I feel for the owner of the amp because he lost time and shipping fee. Am pretty sure Db-R doesnt refund shipping fees (because its rare for a company to refund that).
 
#10 ·
That was the most pathetic form of customer service I have seen in a long time.

Even "IF" you keep getting new customers, once the word spreads about how you treat them after the fact, those numbers will slowly dwindle.

How sad.

After reading that, I personally wouldn't buy anything from you. Nor would I suggest it.

Justin
 
#11 ·
LOL you guys are clueless. With the exception of Arc Audio you just named all the flea market garbage in the Houston area. Your not going to get a rise out of me on this issue, we straight up tell our customers that we are not that nice. Google for dB-r Electronics, you will find it everywhere that we do, in fact, do the best work, and we have lots of haters and lots of very loyal customers, for a reason.
 
#13 ·
Hmm... I have never seen JL Audio, JBL, Alpine, Zapco or HAT at any Flea Market.. I wish I did this hobby would be a lot less expensive!

Are you Sick in the Head or something??? You're most delusional SOB I have ever witnessed!

You're completely out to lunch!

I pray to God that Manville, Jim, Scott, or Andy see this... I would love to hear their response to you calling their stuff garbage.
 
#14 ·
I have never seen a company actually be PROUD of the fact that thier CS sucks. While you may think you have it in the bag with doing work for the OEM's, I think that once you stop working for all the "little people" you will feel you need someone to be rude to. Let me tell you something, you try that **** with one of the bigger OEM's, you will be surprised at how fast you will lose all your business, and then you will be BEGGING regular joes to send their gear to you. And to think that in the past I have advised people to send their blown amps to you, purely based on your reputation. You can be assured THAT won't happen again. By the way, there is a difference between being "nice" and having good CS. If you cant handle the CS side without being a complete douchecanoe, you should hire someone who can, you would make a lot more money that way, and be able to hire more techs, and grow your business. As you can see, good CS is the base of a growing business.
 
#17 · (Edited)
I dunno I have sent amps to TIPS to repair and Ray was always nice and direct to the point. It didn't take 4-6 months to repair the amps either...even to fully mod and repair a few it took 2 weeks at the most.

I worked at Freeman's Car Stereo in the early/mid part of the last decade and they had a large repair center...they were one of the only Fosgate authorized non-warranty repair stations in the country, and they never took that long to repair anything we sent them.
 
#20 · (Edited by Moderator)
Our rep is very stellar, where did you find something bad? Did you read it all the way through?

We are not interested in dealing with companies that insist that we kiss but. Yes we do mostly work for OEM's. Yes I SHOULD hire someone to do the CS because I am not the most "nice" guy around, but problem is my techs here are way worse than I am about handling the CS, so I would have to find someone who is intentionally extra nice, just hard to find that in Texas, maybe I need to import someone. LMAO.

Anyway, sorry if this ruffled some feathers, I don't care what anyone says, I know what really goes on here, and with my customers, and it's not bad at all, I think I only had one other customer in the past that tried to "post a bunch of bs online to make dB-r look bad" and you can find that post with google, but if you read it, you will see in the end, he agreed he was wrong, I was right. He even called me like 3 months later out of the blue and apologized to me. I don't screw people over here, sometimes the things I have to say about a customers amp isn't what they want to hear, but dude, I am just being honest.

If you don't know anything about dB-r and this is the first you have heard of us and have any doubts, just google dB-r Electronics. You can decide for yourself whether we do good work and have good CS, this ONE post here on DIYMA is an isolated incident. Not attempting to save face, just sayin....

And after all, I didn't just stuff his amp back in a box and ship it back to him without at least warning him first. Everyone has their rules, and mine is don't be pushy, we won't tolerate it. We do want the business, but we will not stand for customers being pushy. As I tried to make it clear before, we do good work, and that's the end of it. I really don't want to grow the business anymore than it already is, don't want to deal with the big OEM's trust me we have, and we had problems with them, like they never paid, and they take 5-10 days to call you back, etc. We got plenty of small upstarts that have great products and great CS that we deal with and we prefer to keep it that way.

And yeah, TIPS is great, but they are not the type of shop I am talking about, some of the large OEM's use the OTHER shops, and I am sure if you could get one of their reps (from the large OEM) to tell you the truth, the reason they don't use dB-r and choose to go with those other shops is NOT because of my way of doing business, it's because dB-r is too expensive. We are the most expensive repair shop. I can't name names, so don't PM me asking me which OEM's, but lets just say they are HUGE and they did not do us right, and on top of that they expressed that we are twice as expensive as the other shops they use, even though they know that shop sucks, they use them anyway because they simply cannot afford dB-r.

We recently dropped an OEM because their products are horribly unreliable, bad designs. Again, cannot name names. Anyone here who may know us well, knows which OEM we dropped.
 
#21 ·
I'd say both are in the wrong.

On one hand, it does take time to take an item apart, find out the issues, order parts get said parts in, place parts, make sure it works, and then be done. And then to be doing this for multiple amps, and then have a tech go out... I can totally understand things getting very behind schedule, especially if you're busy in the first place.

On the other hand, he was without his amp for a month.

The attitude... who cares? The guy did get pushy, and I'm sure that he wouldn't like it if people were pushy with him at his job because something out of his control made his workload get backed up. Plus, I'd rather someone be up front and honest with me and be blunt rather than someone be sneaky but super nice and giving me lip service.

Keep in mind a huge part of the delay was because the owner told them it was a different amp than it really was.

Could both sides have done things differently? Yes. But I don't think its fair to place blame on either side.
 
#23 ·
Normally, I would side with db-r on something like this, after having spent 5+ years in retail and dealing with customers. However I don't think you read the OP very well fauee. db-r had the amp for over a month before even opening it up. Then cust. gets back to him 8 days later for a status update, is told "sometime next week". After 7 more days, cust. politely stands his ground( as he should have), and is told not be pushy?!? IMHO, this is a fail on the part of db-r, and looking at the CS log, cust. had more patience than I would have.

Edit: also, if you look closely, db-r is the one who called the amp a d-5, the cust. originally states that it is a "d5000.1"
 
#24 ·
Yeah, at least I admit I am not the nicest, I could have been nicer to him, and I do know this, but as one person asked about this being a niche market and whether politeness, etc are disregarded, it's not completley like that, but in a lot of ways yes it is like that in this particular market, I've been doing it for almost 7 years now, almost an entire decade.... There are plenty of places that do amp repair, but 90% of them don't do it right, hence the cheap price.... I really can't put everything out there that I want to, I would probably end up with a "price on my head" for exposing things about the other shops. Best thing to do before you use an amp repair shop is to ask around before you use them. Relying on which shop comes up top on google ads or has the "nicest" web page won't cut it. Read reviews. Like this one. Unfortunately -1 for dB-r but there's 1000+ good reviews if you google around, so it's "ok" in my book to an extent that we have a couple bad reviews. At least I get to respond, it's what I love about the internet....
 
#26 ·
I'm not sure if this guys cs attitude is amazing arrogance, or alarming ignorance.

Someone who is trusting you with their equipment, and paying you, can be a lil pushy, esp after a long wait.

If someone likes you and your work, they may tell 10 people.

If they don't...they start a thread on line. Ask wade stewart.

And I wouldn't go out of my way to piss off the oems either. They are in business to make money. If someone else can provide a reasonable service for half the cost, then they get the business. Do you not think these guys talk at the bar or on the golf course at CES? Eventually the word gets out.

Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk
 
#27 ·
I've sent a bunch of my audio stuff to TIPS for both repair and mods, and only once had a problem but Ray fixed it right away at no charge (thats the way it has to be when its not the customers fault, and with no attitude). He never took more than 3 days to finish on my stuff and shipped it right after it was completed. So big props to Ray @ TIPS.

I use to work at Oreilly's auto parts and ass holes would come there all the time, I learn that you just have to very kind and nice no matter what, if they dont calm down all you have to do is let someone else handle it. If no one can handle it simply tell the customer "Sir we're sorry we weren't able to help you, please visit our district manager with your problem." Give him the address and send him packing, not that hard.
 
#28 ·
Wow. This is interesting. Also just remembered I have a DBR refurbished sae1200d in my basement that that smoked on initial power up lol. Not really complaining about that, just ironic. It is my fault really as I chose not to send it in under warranty...
 
#29 ·
That can happen, even it's one of the amps from the big OEM's, but yeah, you should have sent it in under warranty.

I agree on the 2 weeks time frame, at first the problem was we ran out of parts, then the problem with a tech getting hospitalized, and only left 2 of us here to do all the work, just couldn't get it done.

And yes I am just that alarmingly arrogant. And yeah, Im on the golf course with them, LOL.... You guys are really cracking me up with some of the comments....
 
#34 ·
LOL you guys really are funny. No we don't work on the older amps anymore, we send them all to Zed Audio, they have parts and things that we would never have because Zed built alot of those amps back in the day for those old school OEM's.

You guys do whatever you want with this thread, I've said my piece on this matter.

:)
 
#36 ·
Maybe if you weren't on here trying to defend your lack of customer service, you could be repairing the next guys amp that is going to be pissed off because you over promise and under deliver.

BTW, whatever went on in your shop that caused the delays is YOUR problem, not the customers. Man up here buddy!!!
 
#35 ·
Lookie lookie, one of db-r's big customers has found this thread.

Jacob, I hope he doesn't treat you the way he does us little folk!

If there is someone who knows how to treat a customer right, it's Jacob. Maybe you can enlighten us.
 
#38 ·
If anyone knows the "truth" about how we are here at dB-r Jacob would be it. Been with Sundown since 2007. He can tell you I am a little rough around the edges to deal with, but always do him right and always honest.


I do care, but I have to stick with my way of doing things, otherwise, I'd find something else to do.....
 
#41 ·
well I finished it and again all I can tell anyone else who reads this is I know a couple amp techs who can take care of your needs and be nice and polite about it.

one is in Vegas and one is here in Louisiana.

the one in Vegas is my usual and he has done work here for a few of us and I have referred quite a few people to him.

if you choose to use the guy here in my area you can also do that. he fixed my Optidrive because shipping was going to kill me to send it in and pay to get it back.


oh and not knocking Zed Audio cause I love the new stuff but some of his techs need a little more practice or something.
 
#43 ·
Yeah, I know a good amp tech in Louisiana, he's probably reading this getting a good laugh.

I know some of you guys think really that I should just be all like "ohhhh, I'm so sorry and stuff" but I just can't be like that, learned that years ago, there are crappy customers out there too that will screw you over. Been screwed over enough to be bitter, and that's just all I can really say about that. If I started naming names and pointing fingers at those people all hell would break loose in the car audio industry so I got to just chill on that, even though I like "stirring the pot" occasionally I don't need to put more out there than I should, not necessarily for the sake of my business, but because some of these OEM's have more lawyer money than I do.....

I got 15 amps to ship out tonight, yeah that's right, so I better get back to it.

Nite ;-)
 
#44 ·
Yeah, I know a good amp tech in Louisiana, he's probably reading this getting a good laugh.


Nite ;-)

actually, I know more than one but I have only talked to Perry Babin and not ever sent him one. The other one is new to me and I have just recently met him.

My normal one has had to fix some of Zeds carnage before..if that says anything
 
#51 ·
Yeah, and they all end up calling me asking me what the chips are on the circuit boards with the numbers rubbed off. It's really just not that simple you can't just repair some of these things you need inside information and hookups from the factory to do repairs on a lot of this stuff. But of course, everyone (but me, LOL) is an expert and I have no idea what I am talking about right? It always goes in this direction....

And no not even close to the end for dB-r.... so funny, like one post on the internet is just gonna kill my business. You guys have no idea how it works behind the scenes... Not saying that if EVERYONE actually read this stuff on diyma.com that EVERYONE would stop dealing with dB-r, but the thing is this, it's just not that popular of a message board here, and if you go copying and pasting it to all the car audio related message boards on the internet, you will get some not so expected responses from my good customers on those other message boards that know how dB-r really is to deal with, which isn't bad at all... LMAO, keep it coming...
 
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