Being a small business, we rely mainly on 'word-of-mouth' advertising for our business. We understand that for this type of advertising to work, one of the things we have to do is to provide an exceptional service to our customers. Luckily for us, exceptional service is one of those things that we are most passionate about, so believe it or not, providing it is actually easy for us

For the past five years, we have been happily providing this exceptional support service, for free, to anybody and everybody who needed it. Unfortunately, we are now at a stage where we are spending so much of our time and money providing support for people who did not purchase their Garmin GPS units from us, that it is starting to affect the level of service that we can provide for our own customers. In the last year alone (2007) we spent just over 800 man hours providing free support for people who purchased their Garmin GPS units from other shops. That is more than 3 hours per working day.

We have now decided to impliment a paid support service for people who purchase their Garmin GPS units from one of the many 'over-the-counter' shops and dealers out there, whilst continuing to provide our full free support service for people who purchase their units from us.

[If you purchased your Garmin GPS unit from us and would like technical support, please contact us on the customer support telephone number printed on your invoice and then give us your invoice or customer account number. If you do not have your invoice and account number handy the first time you call, no worries, call our switchboard and we will pick up your details on our system ;-) ].

Our Tech Support Service Packages:
If you have purchased your unit elsewhere, and are not getting any joy from the dealer that you purchased from, then we have the following paid tech support packages available:

• Package 1: 30 Minutes of telephone or 'walk-in' support @ R 150.00 (Incl.VAT)
• Package 2: 60 Minutes of telephone or 'walk-in' support @ R 280.00 (Incl.VAT)
• Package 3: 120 Minutes of telephone or 'walk-in' support @ R 500.00 (Incl.VAT)

Purchase a package by clicking on the package number above. Packages 1 & 2 (30 minute and 60 minute packages) are valid for 6 months from date of purchase and Package 3 (120 minutes) is valid for 12 months from date of purchase.

Once you have purchased a support package from us, you will receive a customer support account number and a customer support telephone number. Any time you call us on this number (or visit our offices) for technical support, we will ask you for your account number, time the call and deduct the appropriate number of minutes from your support account.

It would obviously be beneficial to you if you could have all of the necessary details of the support required, on hand, before you make the call. All calls will be calculated in 5 minute blocks and rounded down to the nearest 5 minutes (i.e. if your call is 18 minutes and 45 seconds, you will have 15 minutes deducted from your support account).

Note: These Tech Support Service packages are in no way to be confused with the 1 year Warranty support that is included with the purchase of all Garmin GPS units from an Authorised SA Dealer. If your Tech Support call to us turns out to be a Warranty issue, you will not have any minutes deducted from your account.

Support Services include:

• Setting up of the Garmin unit.
• Garmin GPS unit & map troubleshooting.
• Unit software (firmware) updates.
• Map unlocking, loading and updating (we charge for a minimum of 30 minutes if you bring your system in for us to do it but then we will also update the unit firmware for you at the same time).
  [Please note that this service does not include any map unlocking or licensing fees that may be applicable. We will let you know beforehand if any fees are applicable, pay them over to the map distributors directly and then bill you accordingly].

Why should I pay for Garmin support from a dealer? Don't I get free service and support?
From a dealer? We believe that you should. From the dealer that you purchased the unit from in the first place though (of course, this also depends on that particular store's service policies). In reality however, many of the larger shops and mega chain stores are themselves simply not qualified to give specialist advice and support on a product like a GPS device. They have thousands of products in their range and they cannot be specialists in all fields.

Remember that when you puchase a TV, PC, Laptop, DVD player, MP3 player, XBox or even a cellphone from a specific dealer or shop, you cannot just walk into any other shop and ask them to spend anywhere between 20 minutes and 1 hour helping you load software, set up the device properly and teach you how to operate it, without them expecting to be paid for that service. Why should a GPS be any different?

Also remember that you can always get free support from Garmin SA themselves, see below.

So what about the warranty?
Of course, in the event that something goes wrong with your unit and requires a repair or replacement within the 1 year warranty period, you are fully entitled to warranty support from the Garmin dealer that you purchased the unit from as well as from Garmin SA themselves. For Garmin Warranty issues (and Garmin technical/product support), you have the choice of contacting your own dealer or contacting any one of the three Garmin SA offices, in Jhb, Durban or Cape Town. Please see the local Garmin website for their contact details.