Quality
Friends,
First of all, I apologize for the troubles that some of you have experienced and expressed in this column.
Obviously, we have failed to meet both ours and your expectations in some of the coaches we have produced. With nearly 600 coaches out there now, I do take some solace in the fact that I am contact almost daily with many Heartland owners who have had nothing but great experiences with their uints.
We are not at 100% customer satisfaction, but I can assure you that we are not happy when even one has problems with our coaches, and are going to repond to make it right asap.
As an owner of this company, I can tell you that we are not here to just sell coaches and move on. We are in this business to build a better fifth wheel make people's RVing experiences more enjoyable.
That being said, we have real human beings putting these things together and they make mistakes. Our quality control inspectors catch the VAST majority of them; our good dealers catch the vast majority of the rest.
With the Bighorn, it has been more of a challenge as the numbers have increased, but we continue to raise the bar for quality in that plant and have just hired a very well qualified mid-line QC guy from a high-end motorhome company who is going to help that line a lot.
And as soon as we find out about issues or design flaws, we address them. We are not perfect, but I know too much about how fifth wheels have been and are being built in this county to not have the confidence that we are on the right track.
The fact is, we go through workers left and right who we cannot allow to continue to work here because of the way they have been trained to accept the lower quality standards of their previous employers.
We hear it all the time, "Well it was good enough at brand X..."
We are not where we want to be - but we are committed to getting there and along the way - we continue to stand behind our products and repair anything that needs repaired.
Complaints centering around components that we simply install in our coaches and happen to fail or become inoperative is something that RV manufacturers will always have to deal with. The only thing that we can do until that time is try to purchase the best A/Cs, Awnings, Refers, Ovens, Furniture, etc. that we can.
That being said, again, I apologize for what some of you have had to deal with on your coaches, and want you to know Heartland will continue to stand behind our coaches and provide the best customer service that we possibly can - while monitoring our dealers to make sure that they do the same.
I Hope you had a good Holiday weekend. My family and I went camping in our pop-up and had a great time.
ST