Your best or worst experience as a customer

I was in the middle of a trip through the flint hills of kansas when the battery on the KLR died. On a sunday. I had stopped at the monthly rally at cassoday and 321 kawasaki from eldorado kansas had a booth there. They opened the store on a sunday to help me out.

http://www.321kawasaki.com/

Summer of '06 I bought a '99 1100GS on Ebay from Manhattan BMW. The bike had about 26k miles and came with a 90 day warranty. I flew up from Dallas and picked it up on a Wednesday morning. By the time I had fought my way through the traffic and across the George Washington bridge, it was obvious the bike had serious clutch problems. With no place to stay in Manhattan, I continued on to my destination in Newburg and called the salesman back to tell him about the problem. Twenty minutes later, he calls me back with instructions to take it to Max BMW in Troy, NY the next day. It seemed odd that he was sending me to another dealer to get the work done, but I really didn't want to go back to Manhattan anyway. Plus, I wasn't sure how far to trust a service department that had missed something that obvious during their inspection.

Next morning I'm at the shop in Troy about 10 minutes after they open, but they have no idea what I'm talking about. They finally figure out that it was the Max BMW in New Hampshire that had agreed to do the work. So I head over there and arrive after 4:00PM on a Thursday afternoon.

Here's the good part. They met me in the parking lot and had the bike rolled into the shop before I even got inside the building. They gave me a loaner and pointed me to a motel for the night. My bike was done at 5:10PM the next day with a new clutch and seals, new rear brake (which they described as dangerous), plus air filter and odds and ends that should have been checked by Manhattan BMW but were not. I was totally amazed that they had ripped that bike in two to replace a clutch plus repairing all the other things they'd found in only one day. The bill for $1600 went to Manhattan BMW.

I put 3200 miles on it in the next 10 days down the east coast and back to Dallas. I never had another problem with that bike.

Lessons learned were that I wouldn't trust Manhattan BMW to inspect a wheelbarrow, but I'd let Max's work on anything I owned.

Oh yeah, I've had lots of good experiences with Harley dealers when traveling as well. They always seem to be able to work folks who are on the road in as a priority.

This sounds not too different from an experience I had in 1981 with my 1979 Suzuki GS1000S. I was 24 years old then. That was the last time anyone but me worked on my bikes.

I've learned a lot in the 29 years since then.