Dear Thomas,
It was good to see you and Achim yesterday. Returning to your factory at Dettenheim felt rather like coming home, and I would swear that our ‘tank’, as we call the UNICAT we bought from you at the beginning of this year, drove with its own sense of purpose down the last stretch of motorway to your small town.
I, as I am sure is the case with most of your customers, am very particular about detail; the desire to have every aspect of the machine functioning perfectly. How gratifying to find that my list of small snags, the result of thousands of kilometers of travel throughout the summer, was addressed with such concern and interest by you and your Technical Director. Any suggestion at a compromise solution was immediately rejected in favour of the best technical response available.
This questing for the best is of course how you approach the whole of your business operation: From designing and manufacturing your UNICAT machines, each of which is based on the particular needs of the commissioning customer, through the hand-over, in which you spend several days making certain that every aspect of every system is understood by the new user, through to an on-going commitment to providing both practical, and even more importantly emotional help when a technical issue arises in some remote part of the world. The fact that every vehicle and each system within that vehicle is fully documented throughout manufacture means that real support can be given swiftly and effectively.
No Customer Help Lines at UNICAT; your policy of introducing customers broadly to your technical specialists means that when one picks up a telephone in the Artic Circle or sends an email from Africa, a person whom one has already met and knows as an individual will be there to help.
Our UNICAT was not new; indeed it had already given six years of enjoyment to its previous owner, taking him and his young family safely and reliably on journeys into the Ukraine and the deserts of Africa. As you know, the only reason that it became available was that he has ordered a larger replacement, based on a 6×6.
It is often the case that a supplier will feel less committed to the buyer of a used product than to one who has spent the full sticker price. In commercial terms, based on issues of profit margin, this is perhaps understandable. May I say that my experience with UNICAT has been absolutely the opposite. In preparing my ‘tank’ you have all shown great care and concern in getting every aspect of the machine operating to its full new specification.
People looking at it are unable to believe that our UNICAT is nearing its seventh birthday. I know that, with the continuing help and enthusiasm of you and your staff, it will long stay young, ready to take my family on journeys of exploration to remote corners of the world and to experiences that we can as yet not imagine.
Thomas, I thank you.
With best wishes,
Elliot and Cindy Bialick
Devon, UK
