Customer Service - What does your favorite company do ?

Customer service is dying. Tamiya is probably the last best company on that left around. Revell was great, but now that they are owned by Revell Germany, that looms to be a thing of the past. Good luck with anything from China. Every company that I‘ve tried to deal with there is in stealth mode... Academy is a pay for help company. Not the best, but not the worst either...

It is true that customer service seems to be a dying institution.  I say this because it is the exception in cases where I'm wow'ed by really nice service.

I have to say heller , has answered my call's for help on about 3 occasions , with all 3 being free of charge , 

I got great service from Airfix two years ago, the one time  I needed them.

Back in the 60's and even later, most of us remember model part replacement was pretty much expected. Even back then as a kid, I was amazed by that level of customer service. When the little box with replacement parts came, it was like Santa off-season.

Now, every time I hear a positive parts replacement story, I shake my head in wonder and amazement. I like hearing those stories. But expecting it, I'm not so sure about that.

Today, when a company responds with help (and free parts! ), I think that's just great. But if they don't, I don't consider it an apocalyptic event.

Just my

When it comes to scale modeling, the best customer service I have ever received was from Eduard on two different occasions!  

Chad's reply made me realize I got off on a ramble and didn't even respond to your question, TB. Sorry about that.

I've only had one reason to contact a model company since I started back up in '13. I found a mistake on an Eduard PE instruction which at the time I must have thought was of monumental importance, so I emailed Eduard.

To this day, I'm amazed to have recieved a really nice thank you via return email.

Last year I had a missing part problem with a Revell kit. The instructions said said if in the US that the retailer should be contacted, not the company. This was during the mess with Revell and bankruptcy so I had zero expectations but I emailed Scalehobbiest where I bought the kit and was told they'd try to help. After a delay of maybe a month I received the entire sprue containing the needed part which apparently they got from their distributor. I couldn't be more impressed.

Iron Shipwright is the best I’ve ever dealt with.   They have an absolute customer satisfaction policy.  

Buy a kit and inventory the parts. Something missing, contact them and they’ll ship it out.   Probably the whole accessory pack plus extra parts swept off the workbench   Something wrong with a part, short shot, bubbles, or the like.  Ditto. I once bought a 1:350 USS Texas (1898) and the tip of the underwater bow projection was broken       in shipping. I got a whole new hull in the mail    I waterlined the first one  

You’re assembling the kit and you screw up.  Contact them and tell them what’s wrong.  They’ll make it good.   I once drilled too deep inserting mounting hardware - straight through  deck.  They sent another whole kit   Fess up, be truthful   No need to lie about it

You don’t need to buy direct from them. I got a kit on the secondary market.  Missing the PE.  Replacement sent no questions asked

The urban legend is that theyve even replaced parts for a model that was knocked off a shelf by the family cat

They will even custom cast a kit for you if you want it waterline vs whole hull.   They’ll pour it short for you

Revell was great to deal with until everything went FUBAR.

I recently had great success with Kinetic.  I built their CF-18 using kit decals by Cartograf.  Fantastic decals.  Unofrtunately, there aren't enough of the little footprint with an X through them (no step) decals on the sheet.  I wrote to Kinetic and Raymond Chung (owner).  Not long after I got two complete sets of decals in the mail.  Very impressive.