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Thread: Vortex Nation

  1. #41
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    I've used their warranty/customer service twice but for small issues. First I bought a new Razor HD Gen 2 1-6 and I screwed up the battery cap on it. I called looking to buy a new one and they insisted on sending me a new one for free. Second time I bought a used Viper PST 1-4 and did not receive the shim set with it. Again I called looking to buy a set and they sent it to me for free.
    Steve

    Disclaimer: I am employed by Shadow Systems. My posts on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

  2. #42
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    A little late to the party here due to the holidays and such, but figured we'd chime in to hopefully give some more information and answer any questions as needed.

    Some of this may be a tad repetitive as others have already mentioned it, but there also appears to be a lot of misinformation out there intermixed with the correct bits and pieces, so here it is from the horse's mouth, take it or leave it, we really have nothing to hide here.

    Believe it or not, this isn't the first time we've seen this concern raised. There seems to be some kind of customer service/warranty paradox/catch22/warp in space time continuum/etc. People clamour for an amazing customer experience - from getting a quality product for their money to having excellent tech support when questions or concerns arise in the form of real people via phone, e-mail, social media, etc to eventually having an iron clad warranty that makes things downright easy and pain free if/when something eventually goes wrong. On the other hand, they rip companies who actually provide these things to shreads because clearly any company that is able to devote that much time, energy and resources to servicing its customers and providing such an excellent experience is cutting costs somewhere, cheaping out, making shit products, giving shit margins, doesn't really care about the "Enthusiast", sucks the life out of those who know no better and continue to buy products based on a warranty and not "Cuz they actually use their gear"... Are we missing any others?

    Let's unravel a few of these points here:

    1) Vortex makes low quality crap that they sell for too much money to cover the fact that they know it's going to be warrantied a lot - We actually see where you're coming from on this one if you're in this camp. It seems these days as though there are a million and one tech-ey, gimmicky gadget companies with big marketing budgets out to catch your eye on instagram, make big promises, take your money and run off with the profits. Not to mention the fact that unless you've really been following Vortex since the very beginning, it'd be easy to think we just popped on scene with some clever names, a bomb ass warranty and cool marketing about 5 years ago. While we don't claim to have been one of the fore-fathers of optics, Vortex was started in 2002 a family owned and operated business and still is today with the focus on long-term service to our customers in the form of products and customer experience. If we were making crap products we expected to break and backing them up with a lifetime of service, carried out entirely in house by a team in a brand new facility that holds nearly 300 full time employees every day of the week, we'd be out of business and irrelevant so fast you wouldn't even have time to write a nasty post about it. We make products our customers ask for and you can be damn sure we make sure we're confident about them considering the backing we give them.

    1a.) Vortex's warranty is just for marketing - Threw this one in here just for fun. Sure, we post about it, but we don't have this warranty for marketing purposes, we do it because it's the right thing to do. Be as synnical as you want to about that one, but it ain't gonna change the true reason behind why we do it.

    2) Vortex doesn't actually fix anything, they just replace it all - 100% untrue. Some will immediately argue that one time their friend's friend's cousin sent in an optic with just a flickering illumination or something minor and we just replaced it instead of repairing it, which might be true, but that's almost never the whole story. Every warranty request that comes in is handled on a case-by-case basis. More often than not, the repalcement stories come from someone who ran their gun over with their truck, hit their rangefinder with a lawn mower, dropped binos off a cliff, etc. Sometimes, though, we have a hunter who drops their gun off the bench onto concrete two days before leaving for the hunt of a lifetime. They call us up frantically because the illumination knob took the direct impact and doesn't seem to work, for example. We've got a team here of technicians that could totally rebuild that scope to better-than-new spec, but there's simply not enough time for the customer to get their scope here, perform the repair and get the optic back to them in time for their hunt. What happens then? We could tell them "You're S.O.L.", but the right thing to do in our opinion is to take their word for it and assume this situation really is as dire as they say it is and replace the optic with a new one that we can get them much more quickly and figure out what to do with the old one after the dust settles. Not to drone on, but another thing that happens VERY often is, we get a scope in for something fairly simple and upon inspection by our team of technicians, that thing is the least of their worries because they've actually crimped their scope tube with their rings. Our techs check every scope tube to ensure it hasn't been impinged by improper mounting of rings (Which happens often) and regardless of how simple the issue might be that the customer originally sent their scope in for (unrelated to a crimped tube) we will replace the scope because they can't go in and fix an entire body of the scope that has been crimped. That customer will also get a bit of a crash course on how to avoid that problem in the future and they'll get a new scope that probably tracks way better than the old one. Again, these are two of many examples of things that happen here, but hopefully give you some more clarity as to what happens behind the scenes.

    3) Vortex's stuff breaks ALL THE TIME - Well, there's millions of Vortex products out there, many times just millions within one product family alone, and we keep track of it all and can tell you that less than 1% of the products ever come back for repair. By nature of percentages, the larger the whole, the bigger the less-than-1% appears to be. A small slice of a huge pie is a lot bigger than a small slice of a small pie. The overwhelming majority of scopes we receive back are due to user error somewhere in the mounting process, the majority of binoculars that come back are from drops that bust an eyecup or knock them out of alignment (By the way - if you have old binos - check them for alignment. If they make you queezy to look through, they're out of aligment and can be fixed), the majority of spotters is due to drops and rangefinders tend to get eaten by bears a lot. When it comes to scopes, which are the very clear majority of our business, since most of the issues are user error, we get a lot of repeat warranty users. We'll gladly walk them through all the steps and will even range certify their scopes on our guns, but of course, if you have repeated issues with anything, regardless of who's fault it is, it's frustrating and the next logical step is to head to group therapy on the forums.

    4) The only thing worth-while that Vortex makes is Razors and AMG's - No product is perfect - there will be issues with any product on this planet. That said, products that cost more tend to have three things in common - they need to be built to a much higher level of quality than their less-expensive counterparts, less people buy them, and the people who do buy them tend to know what they're doing. These three things mean that you'll probably see less people complain about issues with them and thus they'll seem better. Again, there's millions of Crossfire II's, Diamondbacks and Strike Eagles out there getting the job done perfectly fine. Because there's so many and because they're an entry level product that someone who maybe isn't as well-versed in the neuances of a scope will get, there's going to be more cases in those scopes of things going wrong. Just a fact. That alone doesn't make them any better or worse than other products in the same price category, and being biased, we'd say we are at the very least going to be as good as anything in a similar price category out there, if not better. Feel free to attack us on that last sentence with your own biases - we set ourselves up for it

    Anything else we're missing? Tried to get to 5 because it's a nice even number, but that 1a. threw us off.


    To @Mysteryman (Ironic name) based on your question at the beginning here, it really just sounds like you're quite unfamiliar with what *actually* happens here at Vortex. No harm done, we understand it, but we'd love to answer any other questions you may have and are happy to give you the most candid answers we can muster. In fact - we'd love to have you out to our facility here some time. Are you anywhere near Wisconsin at all? We'd be happy to have you out, set up a tour, take you to our indoor range on-site for some shooting, etc.


    Please let me know if that interests you. I'm one of the family owners here and would be more than happy to get everything all squared away. - Jimmy H jchamilton@vortexoptics.com (Editing because I spelled my e-mail wrong. You'd think I'd have that down by now... Apologies for any inconvenience!)

  3. #43
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Location
    Eastern NC
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    Quote Originally Posted by VortexOptics View Post
    A little late to the party here due to the holidays and such, but figured we'd chime in to hopefully give some more information and answer any questions as needed.

    Some of this may be a tad repetitive as others have already mentioned it, but there also appears to be a lot of misinformation out there intermixed with the correct bits and pieces, so here it is from the horse's mouth, take it or leave it, we really have nothing to hide here.

    Believe it or not, this isn't the first time we've seen this concern raised. There seems to be some kind of customer service/warranty paradox/catch22/warp in space time continuum/etc. People clamour for an amazing customer experience - from getting a quality product for their money to having excellent tech support when questions or concerns arise in the form of real people via phone, e-mail, social media, etc to eventually having an iron clad warranty that makes things downright easy and pain free if/when something eventually goes wrong. On the other hand, they rip companies who actually provide these things to shreads because clearly any company that is able to devote that much time, energy and resources to servicing its customers and providing such an excellent experience is cutting costs somewhere, cheaping out, making shit products, giving shit margins, doesn't really care about the "Enthusiast", sucks the life out of those who know no better and continue to buy products based on a warranty and not "Cuz they actually use their gear"... Are we missing any others?

    Let's unravel a few of these points here:

    1) Vortex makes low quality crap that they sell for too much money to cover the fact that they know it's going to be warrantied a lot - We actually see where you're coming from on this one if you're in this camp. It seems these days as though there are a million and one tech-ey, gimmicky gadget companies with big marketing budgets out to catch your eye on instagram, make big promises, take your money and run off with the profits. Not to mention the fact that unless you've really been following Vortex since the very beginning, it'd be easy to think we just popped on scene with some clever names, a bomb ass warranty and cool marketing about 5 years ago. While we don't claim to have been one of the fore-fathers of optics, Vortex was started in 2002 a family owned and operated business and still is today with the focus on long-term service to our customers in the form of products and customer experience. If we were making crap products we expected to break and backing them up with a lifetime of service, carried out entirely in house by a team in a brand new facility that holds nearly 300 full time employees every day of the week, we'd be out of business and irrelevant so fast you wouldn't even have time to write a nasty post about it. We make products our customers ask for and you can be damn sure we make sure we're confident about them considering the backing we give them.

    1a.) Vortex's warranty is just for marketing - Threw this one in here just for fun. Sure, we post about it, but we don't have this warranty for marketing purposes, we do it because it's the right thing to do. Be as synnical as you want to about that one, but it ain't gonna change the true reason behind why we do it.

    2) Vortex doesn't actually fix anything, they just replace it all - 100% untrue. Some will immediately argue that one time their friend's friend's cousin sent in an optic with just a flickering illumination or something minor and we just replaced it instead of repairing it, which might be true, but that's almost never the whole story. Every warranty request that comes in is handled on a case-by-case basis. More often than not, the repalcement stories come from someone who ran their gun over with their truck, hit their rangefinder with a lawn mower, dropped binos off a cliff, etc. Sometimes, though, we have a hunter who drops their gun off the bench onto concrete two days before leaving for the hunt of a lifetime. They call us up frantically because the illumination knob took the direct impact and doesn't seem to work, for example. We've got a team here of technicians that could totally rebuild that scope to better-than-new spec, but there's simply not enough time for the customer to get their scope here, perform the repair and get the optic back to them in time for their hunt. What happens then? We could tell them "You're S.O.L.", but the right thing to do in our opinion is to take their word for it and assume this situation really is as dire as they say it is and replace the optic with a new one that we can get them much more quickly and figure out what to do with the old one after the dust settles. Not to drone on, but another thing that happens VERY often is, we get a scope in for something fairly simple and upon inspection by our team of technicians, that thing is the least of their worries because they've actually crimped their scope tube with their rings. Our techs check every scope tube to ensure it hasn't been impinged by improper mounting of rings (Which happens often) and regardless of how simple the issue might be that the customer originally sent their scope in for (unrelated to a crimped tube) we will replace the scope because they can't go in and fix an entire body of the scope that has been crimped. That customer will also get a bit of a crash course on how to avoid that problem in the future and they'll get a new scope that probably tracks way better than the old one. Again, these are two of many examples of things that happen here, but hopefully give you some more clarity as to what happens behind the scenes.

    3) Vortex's stuff breaks ALL THE TIME - Well, there's millions of Vortex products out there, many times just millions within one product family alone, and we keep track of it all and can tell you that less than 1% of the products ever come back for repair. By nature of percentages, the larger the whole, the bigger the less-than-1% appears to be. A small slice of a huge pie is a lot bigger than a small slice of a small pie. The overwhelming majority of scopes we receive back are due to user error somewhere in the mounting process, the majority of binoculars that come back are from drops that bust an eyecup or knock them out of alignment (By the way - if you have old binos - check them for alignment. If they make you queezy to look through, they're out of aligment and can be fixed), the majority of spotters is due to drops and rangefinders tend to get eaten by bears a lot. When it comes to scopes, which are the very clear majority of our business, since most of the issues are user error, we get a lot of repeat warranty users. We'll gladly walk them through all the steps and will even range certify their scopes on our guns, but of course, if you have repeated issues with anything, regardless of who's fault it is, it's frustrating and the next logical step is to head to group therapy on the forums.

    4) The only thing worth-while that Vortex makes is Razors and AMG's - No product is perfect - there will be issues with any product on this planet. That said, products that cost more tend to have three things in common - they need to be built to a much higher level of quality than their less-expensive counterparts, less people buy them, and the people who do buy them tend to know what they're doing. These three things mean that you'll probably see less people complain about issues with them and thus they'll seem better. Again, there's millions of Crossfire II's, Diamondbacks and Strike Eagles out there getting the job done perfectly fine. Because there's so many and because they're an entry level product that someone who maybe isn't as well-versed in the neuances of a scope will get, there's going to be more cases in those scopes of things going wrong. Just a fact. That alone doesn't make them any better or worse than other products in the same price category, and being biased, we'd say we are at the very least going to be as good as anything in a similar price category out there, if not better. Feel free to attack us on that last sentence with your own biases - we set ourselves up for it

    Anything else we're missing? Tried to get to 5 because it's a nice even number, but that 1a. threw us off.


    To @Mysteryman (Ironic name) based on your question at the beginning here, it really just sounds like you're quite unfamiliar with what *actually* happens here at Vortex. No harm done, we understand it, but we'd love to answer any other questions you may have and are happy to give you the most candid answers we can muster. In fact - we'd love to have you out to our facility here some time. Are you anywhere near Wisconsin at all? We'd be happy to have you out, set up a tour, take you to our indoor range on-site for some shooting, etc.


    Please let me know if that interests you. I'm one of the family owners here and would be more than happy to get everything all squared away. - Jimmy H jchamilton@vortexotpics.com
    Always awesome to see manufacturers on this forum since its much smaller than the other site. Great response, hope you guys stick around. And I love my Ranger 1300 and Razor 1-6.
    Sic semper tyrannis.

  4. #44
    Join Date
    Feb 2013
    Posts
    1,821
    Feedback Score
    50 (100%)
    Quote Originally Posted by VortexOptics View Post
    A little late to the party here due to the holidays and such, but figured we'd chime in to hopefully give some more information and answer any questions as needed.

    Some of this may be a tad repetitive as others have already mentioned it, but there also appears to be a lot of misinformation out there intermixed with the correct bits and pieces, so here it is from the horse's mouth, take it or leave it, we really have nothing to hide here.

    Believe it or not, this isn't the first time we've seen this concern raised. There seems to be some kind of customer service/warranty paradox/catch22/warp in space time continuum/etc. People clamour for an amazing customer experience - from getting a quality product for their money to having excellent tech support when questions or concerns arise in the form of real people via phone, e-mail, social media, etc to eventually having an iron clad warranty that makes things downright easy and pain free if/when something eventually goes wrong. On the other hand, they rip companies who actually provide these things to shreads because clearly any company that is able to devote that much time, energy and resources to servicing its customers and providing such an excellent experience is cutting costs somewhere, cheaping out, making shit products, giving shit margins, doesn't really care about the "Enthusiast", sucks the life out of those who know no better and continue to buy products based on a warranty and not "Cuz they actually use their gear"... Are we missing any others?

    Let's unravel a few of these points here:

    1) Vortex makes low quality crap that they sell for too much money to cover the fact that they know it's going to be warrantied a lot - We actually see where you're coming from on this one if you're in this camp. It seems these days as though there are a million and one tech-ey, gimmicky gadget companies with big marketing budgets out to catch your eye on instagram, make big promises, take your money and run off with the profits. Not to mention the fact that unless you've really been following Vortex since the very beginning, it'd be easy to think we just popped on scene with some clever names, a bomb ass warranty and cool marketing about 5 years ago. While we don't claim to have been one of the fore-fathers of optics, Vortex was started in 2002 a family owned and operated business and still is today with the focus on long-term service to our customers in the form of products and customer experience. If we were making crap products we expected to break and backing them up with a lifetime of service, carried out entirely in house by a team in a brand new facility that holds nearly 300 full time employees every day of the week, we'd be out of business and irrelevant so fast you wouldn't even have time to write a nasty post about it. We make products our customers ask for and you can be damn sure we make sure we're confident about them considering the backing we give them.

    1a.) Vortex's warranty is just for marketing - Threw this one in here just for fun. Sure, we post about it, but we don't have this warranty for marketing purposes, we do it because it's the right thing to do. Be as synnical as you want to about that one, but it ain't gonna change the true reason behind why we do it.

    2) Vortex doesn't actually fix anything, they just replace it all - 100% untrue. Some will immediately argue that one time their friend's friend's cousin sent in an optic with just a flickering illumination or something minor and we just replaced it instead of repairing it, which might be true, but that's almost never the whole story. Every warranty request that comes in is handled on a case-by-case basis. More often than not, the repalcement stories come from someone who ran their gun over with their truck, hit their rangefinder with a lawn mower, dropped binos off a cliff, etc. Sometimes, though, we have a hunter who drops their gun off the bench onto concrete two days before leaving for the hunt of a lifetime. They call us up frantically because the illumination knob took the direct impact and doesn't seem to work, for example. We've got a team here of technicians that could totally rebuild that scope to better-than-new spec, but there's simply not enough time for the customer to get their scope here, perform the repair and get the optic back to them in time for their hunt. What happens then? We could tell them "You're S.O.L.", but the right thing to do in our opinion is to take their word for it and assume this situation really is as dire as they say it is and replace the optic with a new one that we can get them much more quickly and figure out what to do with the old one after the dust settles. Not to drone on, but another thing that happens VERY often is, we get a scope in for something fairly simple and upon inspection by our team of technicians, that thing is the least of their worries because they've actually crimped their scope tube with their rings. Our techs check every scope tube to ensure it hasn't been impinged by improper mounting of rings (Which happens often) and regardless of how simple the issue might be that the customer originally sent their scope in for (unrelated to a crimped tube) we will replace the scope because they can't go in and fix an entire body of the scope that has been crimped. That customer will also get a bit of a crash course on how to avoid that problem in the future and they'll get a new scope that probably tracks way better than the old one. Again, these are two of many examples of things that happen here, but hopefully give you some more clarity as to what happens behind the scenes.

    3) Vortex's stuff breaks ALL THE TIME - Well, there's millions of Vortex products out there, many times just millions within one product family alone, and we keep track of it all and can tell you that less than 1% of the products ever come back for repair. By nature of percentages, the larger the whole, the bigger the less-than-1% appears to be. A small slice of a huge pie is a lot bigger than a small slice of a small pie. The overwhelming majority of scopes we receive back are due to user error somewhere in the mounting process, the majority of binoculars that come back are from drops that bust an eyecup or knock them out of alignment (By the way - if you have old binos - check them for alignment. If they make you queezy to look through, they're out of aligment and can be fixed), the majority of spotters is due to drops and rangefinders tend to get eaten by bears a lot. When it comes to scopes, which are the very clear majority of our business, since most of the issues are user error, we get a lot of repeat warranty users. We'll gladly walk them through all the steps and will even range certify their scopes on our guns, but of course, if you have repeated issues with anything, regardless of who's fault it is, it's frustrating and the next logical step is to head to group therapy on the forums.

    4) The only thing worth-while that Vortex makes is Razors and AMG's - No product is perfect - there will be issues with any product on this planet. That said, products that cost more tend to have three things in common - they need to be built to a much higher level of quality than their less-expensive counterparts, less people buy them, and the people who do buy them tend to know what they're doing. These three things mean that you'll probably see less people complain about issues with them and thus they'll seem better. Again, there's millions of Crossfire II's, Diamondbacks and Strike Eagles out there getting the job done perfectly fine. Because there's so many and because they're an entry level product that someone who maybe isn't as well-versed in the neuances of a scope will get, there's going to be more cases in those scopes of things going wrong. Just a fact. That alone doesn't make them any better or worse than other products in the same price category, and being biased, we'd say we are at the very least going to be as good as anything in a similar price category out there, if not better. Feel free to attack us on that last sentence with your own biases - we set ourselves up for it

    Anything else we're missing? Tried to get to 5 because it's a nice even number, but that 1a. threw us off.


    To @Mysteryman (Ironic name) based on your question at the beginning here, it really just sounds like you're quite unfamiliar with what *actually* happens here at Vortex. No harm done, we understand it, but we'd love to answer any other questions you may have and are happy to give you the most candid answers we can muster. In fact - we'd love to have you out to our facility here some time. Are you anywhere near Wisconsin at all? We'd be happy to have you out, set up a tour, take you to our indoor range on-site for some shooting, etc.


    Please let me know if that interests you. I'm one of the family owners here and would be more than happy to get everything all squared away. - Jimmy H jchamilton@vortexotpics.com
    Thanks for taking the time to register and address some questions! I’ve been pleased with my Vortex experience so far and will continue to consider Vortex products for future purchases.


    My iPhone XS Max is better than your android!

  5. #45
    Join Date
    Nov 2010
    Location
    Sin City
    Posts
    1,814
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    Now that’s a great first post! Good to see you here and reinforces why I, and a shit ton of other people, buy your products. Keep on doing what you do.

  6. #46
    Join Date
    Sep 2013
    Location
    Republic of Texas near San Antonio
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    Vortex Nation

    JimmyH at Vortex Optics,

    Thanks much for the post. Agree that it is nice to see manufacturers support their products directly.
    Last edited by BuzzinSATX; 12-26-18 at 16:45.

  7. #47
    Join Date
    Jun 2018
    Posts
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    I have a Strikefire and a Venom. Really like both. I’m really hoping the Venom holds up on the slide of my M&P9

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