How is Quality and Customer Service defined in the 21st Century?

A while back Klipsch took care of me.   My daughter was celebrating college graduation,   had a few too many drinks and cranked the volume as she went by the system.    Pegged it, took out both midrange drivers and damaged a tweeter diafram in my Heresy.   Klipsch was kind enough to send replacements and covered it under warranty.  

After Covid customer service is non existent everywhere. I hope quality doesn’t suffer a similar fate. With inflation and the economy where it’s at today manufacturers will be forced to make products even cheaper. Its certainly not like it used to be but when was it ever “like it used to be.”

Do not confuse the consumer concept of "quality" with the manufacturing definition. 

Quality as we see is is does it work and for a long time. In manufacturing, "quality" is if you built what you intended and how long it lasts is "reliability"

In CS, we have excellent examples; Schiit, JDS, Gaselli, Blue Jean, all U.S. small business, VLSI ( Finland), Harvey Woodworking ( Huge Chinese OEM),FEDX,  and many others. Top notch, real people. ( Schiit does have an AI for common questions that is comically snarky but actually pretty reliable. You can still e-mail them and get an answer.  On the other side, we have Facebook. Not far is JRiver, a PAID product who expects the community to support it for free.  

Responsive customer service is still alive and well from companies who care. Do not expect China inc. to give a rats patutti. Multinationals have a more difficult time due to language barriers. Spec bid. lowest cost will have the least support.  Some companies understand, great service will tell someone, bad service will tell everyone you know. Good service is good business but it seems they don't teach that in business school.  As an example, I had an off failure in an Acura. Just after warrantee. Their response was " That does not happen to Acuras" ( cam lobe wiped) and fixed it. I would have gone back next time but they no longer produced a car I wanted. 

@oddiofyl

"Pegged it, took out both midrange drivers and damaged a tweeter diafram in my Heresy."

As an old audio dealer, our rule of thumb was to replace blown drivers "under warranty", no questions asked for the first occurance. Accompanied by a bit of "education" on what makes drivers fail. When we had customers with a history of blowing stuff up, we’d move them to Klipsch because they needed "a speaker that could hurt them before they could hurt it." I can count on one hand the number of "warranty" replacements we made with Klipsch.

Related to the graduation party, nothing says "Party’s over, time to go home" better than the abrupt exit of over 50% of the musical bandwidth as a result of blown drivers. Of course with some modern music, the participants may not have noticed the diference. Unchained Melody, however, would have been a different story.

I've had many interactions with customer service in the audio industry, some good, some not so good. The Klipsch customer service in particular  seemed to be relatively non-existent. Had a stripped binding post connection on a Forte IV, sent several emails, a couple of phone calls, no response. Pretty amazing considering how competitive the audio industry is, can only assume they don't care. Sold the Forte's and moved on.