My wife’s Garmin died last week. Well, at least it appeared to have died. Since we are going to Irelandthis week, and planned to bring it with us, I needed to try to resurrect it. It demonstrated all the conditions of a dead battery, but when plugged into the car charger, it did not seem to charge. A quick look at the fuse in the car charger appeared to be ok, so I was stumped.

Last Saturday, I decided to go online to www.garmin.com and see if their online support would be of help. It wasn’t. No FAQs or such on anything related. So, I decided to email technical support with my “issue.” I sent the email off and got a prompt auto-reply that I would hear from them in about 3 business days (weekends not included). Since we were leaving on Thursday, I did not hold out much hope for help, but at least they did set my expectations. And considering my two month wait with American Airlines, (see a prior post on this blog) three days did not seem so bad (though it was not likely to help me in time).

Since it was my wife’s Garmin, I sent the email from her computer with her name. A couple of hours later she casually mentioned that we had heard back from Garmin and did I want to read the email. I said, it’s probably just an auto-response about how long it is going to take. She said no, it’s an answer.

Wow, was that unexpected. Read the response, fixed the Garmin. How cool was that. Now that’s how customer service in the digital age should work.

Mitch