Tuesday VO Tech Tip: Stellar Customer Service

One thing that I learned from many years in retail – the best warranty is one you never have to use. Buying quality gear tends to be a good strategy. That’s not to say you have to purchase the most expensive stuff, though price can be indicative of better components and higher levels of quality control. But it does have to be “good enough” so you feel you got your money’s worth over the life of the device.

However, even quality gear will fail. Anything which contains circuitry can degrade and fail over time. Circuit boards flex and crack. Solder joints become brittle. Components age out. We typically experience that through weird sounds or increased noise in the signal. It’s always very instructive to see how companies handle these types of failure issues after the sale.

At some point, most of us have experienced poor customer service – a tech agent ghosting us or simply an aggravating-by-design phone tree navigation to actually get through to the company. Often, some big company will move on to the next flashy new gear rollout and forget about those who have already invested in their products.

In contrast to the typical experience, I want to spotlight Rode Microphones for their fast response and ridiculously generous behavior during a recent hardware issue.

A little over 9 years ago, I bought a Rode NTG-2. It was the first shotgun mic I purchased specifically for VO work. Though it never became my favorite vocal microphone, it worked well with a little bit of corrective EQ,  as it tended to be a bit dense in the lower frequencies. While no one would mistake it for the Sennheiser MKH416 which eventually replaced it, the NTG-2 performed solidly when needed. 

Though it had been relegated to “non-booth” work, the NTG-2 continued as my go-to workhorse for teaching remote classes and when communicating with other voice actors through Zoom sessions. When I added the SSL2+ as my main audio interface, the “4K” circuit actually complemented the NTG-2 nicely and made that mic sound pretty darn good.

A couple months ago, I noticed that there was a light buzz in the recordings from that microphone. Swapping XLR cables fixed things, so I figured it had been a temporary issue. After a few days, it returned and clients mentioned they heard even worse glitches on the other end of the connection. When I engaged in more rigorous troubleshooting, I found that I could cause the noise by changing the angle of the mic or tapping on the barrel. This was definitely a hardware issue.

Rode Microphones maintains a product troubleshooting page which suggested tests I’d already made, so I proceeded to the direct contact form, sent a sample of the noise as an attached file and heard back from them within 24 hours. I had a scan of my purchase receipt which confirmed the NTG-2 was still within its 10 year warranty (Yeah, that’s not a typo…) with 3 months to spare. They provided a reference number and I shipped it off to the local stateside warranty center.

About the time I expected to see an email detailing my options, a tracking number notification appeared. My mic was already coming back to me. Except, when the box arrived, it was not “my” microphone. The first indicator was a factory-sealed NTG-2 box which contained a mic clip, wind foam, and zippered pouch, in which was a new NTG-2 microphone with a different serial number. Rode had swapped it out for a replacement.

A complete microphone replacement definitely caused a moment of eyebrow-raised amazement. When purchasing the mic, I recall chuckling that it had “…a 10 year warranty.” Nearly a decade later, Rode stood solidly behind their product, building a solid foundation of trust for their product support.

Have you tested your studio’s audio quality to make sure it meets professional standards? For a free review of your vocal recordings, please use the upload tool on my Audio Review page.

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