artisan Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 (edited) last year i enquired about buying a new bass cab mainly for use with my upright bass,all of my emails were promptly replied to & Alex recommended the Big Baby 2 for me. last November i again made enquiries & once again my emails were replied to promptly. so i placed my order & paid my deposit,no confirmation email,receipt or anything which i was a little worried about,i ended up emailing to ask if they had recieved my order,after a day or so i got a reply but this was several days after i placed my order. since then some emails i sent were not replied to at all & i felt i had to chase Barefaced for a reply. i recieved my cab in January,which i was pleased with but had to push for a delivery date,now i wasn't in a massive rush but had heard nothing at all & was concerned my cab wouldn't arrive before my first gig of the year. since my cab arrived i sent another email thanking Alex for sorting my order out & saying how pleased i am with the cab,so far, & guess what,yes no reply. Barefaced need to sort out their customer service as if they wish to operate as a top flight company then they need the level of customer service that goes with that,as it is i just spent £699.00 with them & feel pretty much ignored,like i am an inconvenience to them. i work in retail & no matter how busy i am i look after my customers properly,if i didn't i'd be out of work pretty damn quick. having said that my cab is awesome,first gig next saturday,but i'd think carefully before i ordered anything else from here. rant over,as you were. Edit: I just remembered I also emailed Alex asking for a receipt/invoice for my cab & he's ignored that email too. totally craps,if my cab doesn't really impress me next Saturday he can have the sodding thing back ! Edited January 24, 2015 by artisan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paddy109 Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 Artisan, I have recently placed an order for a super midget after some good email conversations with Alex. On paying a deposit I had a confirmation email, this was a few weeks ago. I have since had a reply to a further email giving me an update of where my cab is in the build and an approx delivery date. So far so good - just thought I would pass on my experience. When spending an awful lot of money (for me this is a major once in a blue moon purchase) I would expect nothing more from a British company dealing directly with their customers. So far for me I couldn't expect more. I will update this post once I have paid balance and received cab on how this part of the process went. Paddy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artisan Posted January 24, 2015 Author Share Posted January 24, 2015 [quote name='paddy109' timestamp='1422095040' post='2668576'] Artisan, I have recently placed an order for a super midget after some good email conversations with Alex. On paying a deposit I had a confirmation email, this was a few weeks ago. I have since had a reply to a further email giving me an update of where my cab is in the build and an approx delivery date. So far so good - just thought I would pass on my experience. When spending an awful lot of money (for me this is a major once in a blue moon purchase) I would expect nothing more from a British company dealing directly with their customers. So far for me I couldn't expect more. I will update this post once I have paid balance and received cab on how this part of the process went. Paddy [/quote] Hi Paddy,I'm glad you got good professional service from them,unfortunately I didn't & it's left a sour taste for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stingrayPete1977 Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 I can hear the BF massive coming!.........Lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lowregisterhead Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 Let me preface what I'm about to say by pointing out that one bad experience will invariably bring others to light, and I'm sure most Barefaced customers are very happy, but unfortunately I had a similar experience to artisan. I emailed Alex a couple of times before placing an order, and he reponded very quickly to my questions. However, once I had ordered and paid for the cab, it took a good deal longer than quoted to arrive, and like artisan I had to constantly chase Alex for info on its progress. When it did arrive, initally I very was pleased with it, but sadly the HF horn in the cab failed on only its second outing. I emailed him that night (at that time there was no other means of contacting him - I see there is now a phone number on the website) and Alex called me the following morning (a Saturday) but his response was that I must have done something to have caused it to fail, which I hadn't. On the evening in question I was playing with a corporate function band in a large venue on the south coast with a large PA and full onstage monitoring, so the cab wasn't being pushed even vaugely hard. I've had enough experience of equipment to know that this stuff can just happen sometimes, but his tone was not helpful. I returned it to him a couple of days later for repair, however his general demeanour, coupled with the fact that my confidence in the cab was now a bit shaken, prompted me to return it under his 'one month trial' offer, but it took almost a month and a couple of reminder emails before I finally received a refund. All that said, he's clearly a very knowledgeable guy, but IMHO his business would fare much better if he handed over customer service to someone else, and concentrated solely on the technical side. All of the above was a couple of years ago, so hopefully things have changed, but due to my experiences, I certainly wouldn't buy a Barefaced product again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thurbs Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 (edited) I had a simular experiance to the OP buying a Midget-T a few years ago. It got slightly worse when I had a problem and the response was less than pro-active. I tend to buy stuff second hand, usually off here and get much better service! I also agree with the OP. Barefaced need to grow, but in a way which keeps the service personal or stick it in the shops and let the retailer do it. EDIT: I should add, the product is superb and is worth the poor service IMHO. Edited January 24, 2015 by Thurbs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JTUK Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 (edited) [quote name='stingrayPete1977' timestamp='1422095908' post='2668597'] I can hear the BF massive coming!.........Lol [/quote] There might be... other companies have to contend with 'issues' for and against. Edited January 24, 2015 by JTUK Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alexclaber Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 [quote name='artisan' timestamp='1422093244' post='2668552'] last year i enquired about buying a new bass cab mainly for use with my upright bass,all of my emails were promptly replied to & Alex recommended the Big Baby 2 for me. last November i again made enquiries & once again my emails were replied to promptly. so i placed my order & paid my deposit,no confirmation email,receipt or anything which i was a little worried about,i ended up emailing to ask if they had recieved my order,after a day or so i got a reply but this was several days after i placed my order. since then some emails i sent were not replied to at all & i felt i had to chase Barefaced for a reply. i recieved my cab in January,which i was pleased with but had to push for a delivery date,now i wasn't in a massive rush but had heard nothing at all & was concerned my cab wouldn't arrive before my first gig of the year. since my cab arrived i sent another email thanking Alex for sorting my order out & saying how pleased i am with the cab,so far, & guess what,yes no reply. Barefaced need to sort out their customer service as if they wish to operate as a top flight company then they need the level of customer service that goes with that,as it is i just spent £699.00 with them & feel pretty much ignored,like i am an inconvenience to them. i work in retail & no matter how busy i am i look after my customers properly,if i didn't i'd be out of work pretty damn quick. having said that my cab is awesome,first gig next saturday,but i'd think carefully before i ordered anything else from here. rant over,as you were. Edit: I just remembered I also emailed Alex asking for a receipt/invoice for my cab & he's ignored that email too. totally craps,if my cab doesn't really impress me next Saturday he can have the sodding thing back ! [/quote] Hi Neil, I'm so sorry to hear that you feel like this. I know when you placed your order I said the current queue was "a month or so, though that depends on how smoothly things run here". You should have received a confirmation email from PayPal as soon as your order went through - I just made a purchase from our site via my personal email address and it worked but I know emails like that can vanish into spam folders. As you said, two days later I did send a confirmation email confirming your cab had been allocated into the production queue. When you got in touch on the 22nd Dec warning us of your next gig on the 31st Jan I replied that day to say you should have the cab before then (I don't think I ever say 'definitely' nowadays because knowing my luck the bloody building will then go and burn down or something...) As you'll recall you emailed on on the 13th Jan because your band were hassling you about not having a cab to rehearse with, so we jumped you a week up the queue and sent you a cab that day. I was very happy to read your overwhelmingly positive comments about the appearance and build quality of the cab and about the tone from your low volume tests when you received it and noted down that you'd asked for a receipt "but no rush whatsoever for that", so I was looking forwards to emailing you with that receipt and asking how your first gig (next weekend) had gone with the cab. I saw your email earlier today asking for your receipt again so I'd made a note to email it to you next week, as it must have been more urgent than I realised. I'm sorry you didn't get the cab before Xmas as you'd hoped (and obviously the Xmas break delayed it by another fortnight). I'm really sorry that you feel like you've been "pretty much ignored" and an "inconvenience" and I assure you that's not the case. Based on your email on the 16th Jan I'd assumed you were very happy with the cab and I was looking forward to finding out how it performed on your gig at the end of the month. The only unreplied email from you I can find on any of our accounts is the one you sent saying that the cab looks fantastic and asking for a receipt, which I was going to respond to the first week of Feb after your first gig - I will check nothing has vanished into the spam filters on our non-gmail accounts in case you sent one to the customer services address and it disappeared into the ether. I hope you understand that we didn't mean to disappoint you in the way your post describes and I wrongly thought we'd done a decent job of looking after you. ----- To anyone else who has been frustrated by our customer service, since we started in late 2008 right up to now, I can only apologise. Starting and growing a business which does all its design and manufacturing here in the UK has not been an easy ride and the challenge of simply surviving has sometimes caused us to drop far too many of the 'non-essential' plates that you have to keep spinning if you want to be a great company. With the investment we've put in over the last 6+ years I think we're finally at that point where we have products which are world class in all aspects, manufacturing processes which work efficiently (we're still sorting out some of our stock control and accounting processes) and we should be able to make sure that 99.99% of our customers have a great purchasing experience once we've tidied up some more of the details of how we deal with all our pre-sales, pre-shipping and post-purchases communication. I do have a list of things I want to address to improve the customer experience, the first being finally having cabs in stock or with very short lead times (at the current production rate this should happen in February) and the second being a nice printed quick-start guide to go with each model and a more comprehensive manual, so customers can get the most out of their new purchase. There's lots more but they're the first two. For a long time I've dreamed of the day when anyone emails and I can say you can have it tomorrow (or at least this week if you're overseas) and that's close to being a reality. If you did buy a Barefaced cab in the past and either returned it or sold it on fairly quickly because you were disappointed with our service or the cab itself, if you'd consider giving us a second chance then I'd be happy to consider loaning out some demo cabs. It's less of a gamble buying our stuff now we're better established but we really do particularly appreciate those of you who were brave enough to buy an oddball cab from a funny little British company run by an argumentative sod, especially when you fell foul of us being spread too thin to provide consistently good service... Best regards, Alex Managing Director Barefaced Ltd www.barefacedbass.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yorks5stringer Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 Can't argue with that response. Good to see Alex has got a "handle" on things now! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beedster Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 [quote name='artisan' timestamp='1422093244' post='2668552'] Edit: I just remembered I also emailed Alex asking for a receipt/invoice for my cab & he's ignored that email too. totally craps,if my cab doesn't really impress me next Saturday he can have the sodding thing back ! [/quote] I'll have it if you're not happy. I understand the O/P's POV, but I do wish that things were different. I work in a university in which, increasingly, the quality of the education that students receive is considered secondary to the quality of the customer service that students receive, and by customer service I mean the speed of response to emails as opposed to the quality of the response, the 'niceness' of feedback on coursework as opposed to the effectiveness of that feedback etc. In short, in my job increasingly appearances matter more than actuality, style matters more than substance, and it's consistent with so much elsewhere. Does a response to an email matter more than the quality of the product, no, not at all. I have a BF Compact and to be honest it works for me on so many levels that no amount of poor customer service from BF could undermine my happiness with the cab. I also bought a 69er from Alex a while back and it didn't work for me, and I told him so. What was his response "You can have a full refund". How many manufacturers work on that basis, very few (BTW the 69er was a great cab in every respect except for one particular aspect of the way I needed to use it which I hadn't really thought through fully when ordering). Neil, really hope you like the cab mate, but if not, I know how good they are so I'll have it for what you paid for it. C Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wooks79 Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 I've always been a very happy Barefaced user (a Compact, and then a Vintage) and had great comms with Alex before and after my purchasing experiences, so that's the other side of the coin I guess. Barefaced are currently one of the few brands that still consistently gives me GAS, and I hope to get more cabs, if funds would ever allow (I dream of a 2x retro610 setup ) I am consistently surprised how much stick Alex and Barefaced get, and think that maybe people have so far expected a lot more of such a small company on the rise than they might even get from a bigger faceless company. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artisan Posted January 24, 2015 Author Share Posted January 24, 2015 [quote name='Beedster' timestamp='1422135568' post='2669196'] I'll have it if you're not happy. Neil, really hope you like the cab mate, but if not, I know how good they are so I'll have it for what you paid for it. thanks Chris,i'm sure i will love it,just feel very frustrated with the whole experience C [/quote] [quote name='alexclaber' timestamp='1422134490' post='2669183'] Hi Neil, I'm so sorry to hear that you feel like this. I know when you placed your order I said the current queue was "a month or so, though that depends on how smoothly things run here". You should have received a confirmation email from PayPal as soon as your order went through - I just made a purchase from our site via my personal email address and it worked but I know emails like that can vanish into spam folders. As you said, two days later I did send a confirmation email confirming your cab had been allocated into the production queue. When you got in touch on the 22nd Dec warning us of your next gig on the 31st Jan I replied that day to say you should have the cab before then (I don't think I ever say 'definitely' nowadays because knowing my luck the bloody building will then go and burn down or something...) As you'll recall you emailed on on the 13th Jan because your band were hassling you about not having a cab to rehearse with, so we jumped you a week up the queue and sent you a cab that day. I was very happy to read your overwhelmingly positive comments about the appearance and build quality of the cab and about the tone from your low volume tests when you received it and noted down that you'd asked for a receipt "but no rush whatsoever for that", so I was looking forwards to emailing you with that receipt and asking how your first gig (next weekend) had gone with the cab. I saw your email earlier today asking for your receipt again so I'd made a note to email it to you next week, as it must have been more urgent than I realised. I'm sorry you didn't get the cab before Xmas as you'd hoped (and obviously the Xmas break delayed it by another fortnight). I'm really sorry that you feel like you've been "pretty much ignored" and an "inconvenience" and I assure you that's not the case. Based on your email on the 16th Jan I'd assumed you were very happy with the cab and I was looking forward to finding out how it performed on your gig at the end of the month. The only unreplied email from you I can find on any of our accounts is the one you sent saying that the cab looks fantastic and asking for a receipt, which I was going to respond to the first week of Feb after your first gig - I will check nothing has vanished into the spam filters on our non-gmail accounts in case you sent one to the customer services address and it disappeared into the ether. I hope you understand that we didn't mean to disappoint you in the way your post describes and I wrongly thought we'd done a decent job of looking after you. ----- To anyone else who has been frustrated by our customer service, since we started in late 2008 right up to now, I can only apologise. Starting and growing a business which does all its design and manufacturing here in the UK has not been an easy ride and the challenge of simply surviving has sometimes caused us to drop far too many of the 'non-essential' plates that you have to keep spinning if you want to be a great company. With the investment we've put in over the last 6+ years I think we're finally at that point where we have products which are world class in all aspects, manufacturing processes which work efficiently (we're still sorting out some of our stock control and accounting processes) and we should be able to make sure that 99.99% of our customers have a great purchasing experience once we've tidied up some more of the details of how we deal with all our pre-sales, pre-shipping and post-purchases communication. I do have a list of things I want to address to improve the customer experience, the first being finally having cabs in stock or with very short lead times (at the current production rate this should happen in February) and the second being a nice printed quick-start guide to go with each model and a more comprehensive manual, so customers can get the most out of their new purchase. There's lots more but they're the first two. For a long time I've dreamed of the day when anyone emails and I can say you can have it tomorrow (or at least this week if you're overseas) and that's close to being a reality. If you did buy a Barefaced cab in the past and either returned it or sold it on fairly quickly because you were disappointed with our service or the cab itself, if you'd consider giving us a second chance then I'd be happy to consider loaning out some demo cabs. It's less of a gamble buying our stuff now we're better established but we really do particularly appreciate those of you who were brave enough to buy an oddball cab from a funny little British company run by an argumentative sod, especially when you fell foul of us being spread too thin to provide consistently good service... Best regards, Alex Managing Director Barefaced Ltd www.barefacedbass.com [/quote] thanks for the reply Alex. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artisan Posted January 24, 2015 Author Share Posted January 24, 2015 thanks to every one who has responded,but please don't post anymore i really don't want to start a Barefaced Bashing thread,we have too many of them already Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Billy Apple Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 Well, if you are satisfied with the outcome (and I guess satisfied with Barefaced customer service), I'll lock this if you feel that way? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artisan Posted January 24, 2015 Author Share Posted January 24, 2015 [quote name='Billy Apple' timestamp='1422141017' post='2669265'] Well, if you are satisfied with the outcome (and I guess satisfied with Barefaced customer service), I'll lock this if you feel that way? [/quote] hi,yes please do, i don't want another flaming session - even though i started it. feel free to delete the thread if possible cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Billy Apple Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 No problem. We keep the topic visible though for reference. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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