Lowrance recommites itself to its customers with the Advantage Program

[HONDAM]

Lowrance has unveiled a new program called the Advantage Program. It is a warranty and service program designed to provide better a better warranty and premium service beyond the warranty period.

Some key points include:

-Standard 2 year warranty on most products

-Factory offered trade in offers during warranty process.

-Replacement of failed units outside warranty period (for a fee)

-Available warranty upgrades including Onboard service (we come to you)

Basically to qualify for this program you must have your unit installed or inspected (installed yourself or by a non certified dealer) by an Lowrance Advantage certified dealer. We offered the inspections for free, the inspection also include an orientation with the unit so its a great way to quickly familiarize yourself with the product.

Now to elaborate on the details with examples (prices are just examples, not quotes):

Say you have a HDS-5 and it goes bad in the warranty period. You can have this unit replaced free of charge OR for $200 they will send you back a HDS-7 instead.

Say that HDS-5 goes bad in 3 years (and up to 5 years) you can replace it for $399 instead of the $699 it retails for.

Also if you have a tournament coming up they offer a 24 hour swap program. Where you call up and leave deposit and they have you a new unit the next day. Assuming they get your defective unit and it is a legitimate warranty claim you get your money back.

Now another neat feature of the program is say you drop you HDS-5 on the concrete and it breaks to pieces, destroying it and you are still in the warranty period. You can have it replaces for $399 instead of the $699 they sell for. Or you can upgrade to an HDS-7 for $200 more.

The whole purpose of this program is to provide options to current Lowrance customers who are having problems and try to maintain their loyalty by offering deep discounts on upgrades for units in warranty and deep discounts on replacement for current Lowrance users out of warranty so that they remain customers.

Another big part of the program is on the dealers side. They are trying to establish an qualified and educated dealer base by training and testing those dealers. Therefore when you have an issue, warranty or not, all you need to do is look up your nearest certified dealer and then you will have some to deal with face to face rather then the standard phone tree of the past.

I will admit Lowrance has not been my brand of choice in the past but this new program is truly groundbreaking. Its really an honest effort to try and take care of their customers and I cant fault them for that.

IF you already have an HDS, its less then 5 years old, and want to take advantage of this program you can, just get it inspected and your in.

This program also applies to Simrad and B&G products, not just Lowrance.

[pap]

This is great news for the general public to know, as many people fear to buy lowrance products on the notion that customer service was poor to say the least! Linedancing has mention numerous time that they cleaned house in the customer service area, I for one was leary of buying a unit, but since I heard that customer service was much better, I bought a Lowrance unit this year, only because they came out with the Elite 7 which was in my budget and it does all the things the higher end units do. The only thing I was not happy with is comes with a 1 year warrenty, not much of a warrenty for a $800.00 unit, but hearing this new customer service program make me a little more at ease. I don't get out as often as most of you guys, so if it works 10 times this year that will be my warrenty, hopefully I have no problems, if not I hope it fails with in that time period.Thanks for bringing this info to our attention. PAP.

[aprils fool]

That sound like a great program thanks for posting, Does Lowrance already have a list of the Advantage certified dealers??

Good Fishing,

Troy

[HONDAM]

This year is a transition year, all dealers are going to be grandfathered in. It's to give dealers time to complete the new required training, but if they don't complete it by 2014 they can still stay a dealer just won't be certified. Although I wouldn't expect a lot of dealers to have much information, because its so new. Calumet Marine was the first dealer in the US to complete the training and to be certified and it was only because we reached out seeking the information and were taking the test along Navico employees rather then other dealers.

[HONDAM]

A recent success story for this Advantage program. I just recently took an older HDS-10 Gen 1, that was completely fried and no longer fixable on trade for a brand new HDS-12 Touch for about $1500 which has a MSRP of $2999. So basically I was able to give the customer nearly a $1500 value on a several year old non working unit under this program that would have been otherwise worth $0.