Way back in December 2003, I was travelling a lot more than I have been lately. Frustrated with the cheaper headphones I had been using to listen to my Ipod and movies on planes, I splashed out on a pair of Bose QuietComfort 2 Headphones. These things are fantastic, the noise cancelling is great, and the sound quality is everything you would expect from Bose.
A couple of weeks ago, the plastic shielding on the left arm broke; this meant that the left dome wobbled about in the breeze and made them pretty unusable. Since I bought the headphones in the US, I only had a years warranty on them (it is 2 years if you buy them in Europe) so I was definitely out of my warranty period. At first I was thinking that I would simply glue them back together to save me the cost of repair. However, these headphones cost quite a lot of money, so I changed my mind and decided that the right thing to do would be to send them off and take the cost of getting them professionally repaired.
So, I called Bose and arranged for them to be sent in. I told the guy on the phone that they were a US pair, and he confirmed that since they were out of warranty, they would take a look at them and then call me back with a cost to repair prior to doing any work.
They sent me a pre-paid UPS sticker for me to send the headphones back to them, which I duly did. I then went away to Ireland for 8 days and thought nothing more of it. When I returned, there was a parcel waiting for me at a neighbours house; I was surprised to see that it was from Bose, since I had not heard from them at all.
I opened the package fully expecting a note saying "we are sorry, this is not repairable unless you feel like superglueing it". To my total surprise, inside the package was a completely unopened, brand new set of headphones.
So, to recap: they paid the postage in both directions, and replaced my headphones with a new pair totally free of charge, despite them not being under warranty any longer. That gives them an A+ in Customer Service in my book.
Bose ROCKS.