Dear ATI Customer Service,
The warranty registration page on your website has been taken down, so I hope you can help me. I just picked up an ATI VK-22 for testing and evaluation. I took the rifle out for a morning of family shooting today. Unfortunately the bolt assembly of your rifle tore itself apart after firing approximately 250 rounds. My eight year-old daughter was shooting when the rifle self-destructed; it’s very fortunate that she wasn’t injured. Before-and-after photos, and a more detailed description of the failure, are documented at www.thetruthaboutguns.com . . .
As I mentioned, your warranty page is down, and there’s no warranty repair phone number is listed on your website.
I would be grateful if someone could call me tomorrow at XXX-XXX-XXXX to arrange the immediate delivery of a replacement bolt carrier assembly, or the delivery of a complete replacement rifle to my FFL dealer.
Obviously, the catastrophic failure of a new rifle after only 250 rounds is unacceptable, and I expect that ATI will want to resolve this as quickly as possible.
Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Chris Dumm
UPDATE: I’m thinking it’s a good idea to write for a large gun blog when you need customer service. Chiappa (Ron Norton) responded to my query before I woke up this morning (West Coast)., They’re mailing me a whole new bolt assembly. ATI is standing by for warranty repair, since Chiappa is already on it. I’m waiting for word where to mail the failed parts; I hope somebody wants to examine them to see what went wrong.
For their part, ATI Customer Service guy Chris Stinson has this to say about that:
“Sorry about the inconvenience of our warranty registration being down. We are in the process of getting it up and running. As we all know the web site has been under construction for some time. Rest assured that the site will be up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for your support. If you would like to call and talk to me please call 1-800-290-0065 ext 141.”
It’s sort of troubling how prominent on their page that warranty tab is. Assuming most people scan a page left to right you come to warranty information before you get to products, that doesn’t exactly inspire trust in their products if even the company know you’ll need warranty information quicker than product info.
Maybe this time they’ll send you a “T&E” grade .22 kit.
Call me weird but when I’m looking at an unfamiliar company’s site one of the first things I do, if I’m in a buying mood, is check out the warranty page. If they don’t have a good warranty policy or the page is not there then their products get looked at with a large dose of scepticism. Happily they answered his query in a timely manner. We’ll see how well they follow-up.