My Ruger Customer Service Story
Here's my Ruger Customer Service Story.
I offer it because i think it's funny, not because I believe it is typical of Ruger's Customer Service
About three, maybe four, years ago, I bought my first sidearm in a long, long time, and only my second sidearm ever: a Ruger KP94. Good looking gun, but problems from the first magazine I tried to fire through it: mostly failures to eject, couple of stove pipes. Couldn't get a magazine to shoot through it cleanly. Called customer service. Nice lady answered, my age (which is not young). She said I needed a new extractor and they'd get it out in the next day's mail, which they did.
A buddy helps me switch it out. Like I said, it was only my second handgun and I was not, at that time, all that comfortable working on guns. Take it back to the range. It's worse. Way worse. First round through, it stove pipes; clear it; try again and another stove pipe. I disassemble; reassemble; try again. Even worse, not only does it stove pipe, but the ejector pops out. I reassemble, try again, another stove pipe and the ejector is now poking out of the ejector port.
So that was a short trip to the range and I call Customer Service again the next morning. Get a guy on the line this time. He says he's new on the job but he remembers sending me the replacement ejector. He says he'll ask around and get some advice from some of the other guys around the shop and get back to me. This is seeming kind of folksie and reassuring and I'm glad to be talking to the actual person who's working my issue and he remembers the issue and I'm picturing an atmosphere like the locally owned muffler shop.
He calls back a couple of hours later and I can't take the call, so it goes to voice mail and when I listen the message he says, basically, this is no big deal, some of these ejectors just need a little adjustment: I should set extractor on the edge of a workbench or table with the curve pointing up and give it a whack or two, re-insert and see how that shoots; if it's okay, great; if it's better but not okay, apply more whacks on that side; if it's worse, try whacking the other way, and if I have any questions feel free to call back.
I had questions.
I called back. I got the lady with whom I had spoken the first time. I described to her the advice I had gotten in the voice mail message. I think she said some like, "oh dear."
I continued, "I shoot at a public range and I am pretty sure that you do not want me disassembling on of your weapons in front of a lot of other shooters and taking a ball peen hammer to its parts."
She said, "Oh, no. And that's not necessary." She said she was pretty sure that what had happened was the new guy had either restocked the bin for KP94 extractors with extractors for some other Ruger semi-automatic or had pulled the extractor that he sent to me from the wrong bin. "They look a lot alike," she said. And I totally believe her.
She promised to get me the right extractor in that day's mail and I had it two days later. I'd had plenty of experience swapping out extractors by then and didn't need any help this time around and, yes, the new extractor did solve the problem, mostly. I think I had maybe one or two failure to ejects over the next couple hundred rounds; and wound up trading that weapon for an H&K USP-Compact that I still own and shoot regularly.
And, while I was "off" of Ruger products for a while after that, I think it's important to note that I've bought several since then (a Mini-30, a Blackhawk Convertible and an SP101) and have experienced only one jam (in one of the first magazines fired through the Mini-30) which has not repeated itself. So, these days, I own more Rugers than thing else.
(I don't know that I'd recommend the Mini-30 over the many other similarly chambered carbines available, but that's what I knew of then and what I bought and I've got no plans to sell it. And I'm definitely keeping, and would cheerfully recommend, either of the revolvers. I'm clearly not in a position to recommend the KP94.)
But I still get a kick out of that voice mail: "give it a whack or two; not too hard."
So seeing your much better Customer Service Stories, I wanted to share.
