Agency6 - crazy customer service

Hello.

I'm not in the habit of shilling or purchase justification, but I do believe in shouting out companies when they do right, because it seems like a lot of people absolutely live for the chance to trash whatever they can, whenever they can, and that gets in the way of people looking for honest products and honest companies.

I don't judge people or companies when they make mistakes (usually - gross negligence is something entirely, but I digress.), I judge them for how they handle the mistakes. I'm writing this to shout out Agency6 for handling it better than they even remotely had to.

tl;dr: I paid a premium for a US-made part and actually got my money's worth and then some. That's a shocking thing these days, unfortunately.

Here's the whole story if you want to read it:

About two years ago, I picked up an Agency6 billet shackle while I was upgrading my winch (wiring starts here / reverse engineering starts here if you're interested - the EVO series are weird) for a couple reasons. It was cost and feature competitive, I hadn't seen a ton of bogus-ass paid shill reviews for it, and it fit my needs. I liked that I didn't have to buy a separate cover plate to protect the thimble end from salt/debris/UV like a couple of their highly rated competitors and clones.

After about a year, I noticed some dings on the powdercoat - something that didn't exactly surprise me, it being mounted on the front of a truck and used pretty heavily, but when I went to go touch it up, I noticed the powder was coming off in big flakes, like with my thumbnail.

The photos below were what happened with about a minute of me going after a couple little dings with, literally, my thumbnail:



I want to be clear here, just as I was when I called Agency6, that I wasn't exactly mad about finish damage on the part - it's a bigass hunk of aluminum that rides on the front bumper of a truck that goes places trucks don't normally go.

It was obvious, however, that the powder wasn't applied correctly (my guess and theirs, based on a conversation, is that someone didn't degrease one properly when it was time to go from CNC to powder - like I said, shit happens). I just figured I would give them a heads up that they might have a problem with whoever was doing their powder, in case they wanted to trace the batch or whatever.

So, I called their customer service number mostly just to see if it worked, and to my surprise an actual human answered, understood the issue I was trying to communicate, and offered an immediate replacement because "we expect our products to outlast the vehicles they get purchased for." (Like I said, judge them based on how they handle mistakes, not if they ever make one).

That quote actually really stuck with me. I declined the offer, because it seemed like a waste of time and money for everyone involved to replace something for a cosmetic fault that gets dragged in the rocks and occasionally used as a throw weight. I honestly pretty much just figured I'd let the rest of the powder fall off, then rattlecan it tractor red like the rest of my recovery hardware.

He asked for pictures, so they could isolate the issue and determine what the cause might be, and I obliged (the ones you see above), again refusing an offer for replacement.

Well, a couple of days ago, I was transplanting the shackle to a new line, and the little buttonheads that hold the pin keeper plate in place rounded right off under hand pressure.

Y i k e s.

I wondered if the offer for a replacement was still on the table, after another year of, frankly, beating the shit out of this thing in one of the most hostile environments in the CONUS - rural Vermont, in the bowels of Salt Hell. When they got it back it was going to be obvious that it had been pretty well chewed on, and it really would not have surprised me if they had said this particular damage was due to abuse.

While I was pondering, I got a call to pull a guy out of a spot he had no business being in, and told him I'd be there as soon as I had my winch put back together.

I managed to get one of the screws out with an EZ-Out, and the other one blew up entirely. One screw from the stainless hardware jar later, and despite looking like it got dragged for a couple thousand miles on an anchor chain in the Carribean, the shackle worked fine.

This morning, I called Nate back at Agency6 and asked if the offer was still on the table. He said absolutely, no questions asked, what's your shipping address and what color do you want?

He said they'd seen the problem with the keeper screws once before, a customer in a very isolated part of Alaska, and they think possibly marine corrosion is what got his. He did say that they've since been putting anti-seize on at the factory, but if I was up here in Salt Hell, I might want to add a little more myself when the new one gets here.

In other words, an isolated problem that they heard about and immediately improved the product to prevent. He said their goal is to make the best product possible, and I believe it.

Overall, I gotta say - as someone who has used it as more than a decoration, the shackle itself has been absolutely great, and honestly, if a shiny new one wasn't on the way, I'd keep using it. If I thought it mattered, it wouldn't be that hard to drill out the one broken 8-32 and replace it with a 10-32, but I would bet that this thing will continue to work absolutely fine probably longer than my truck. They didn't even want it back, so I'll probably keep it as a backup.

Anyway, huge shoutout to a US company that puts their money where their mouth is.

 

Excellent review!

 

thanks for sharing your review. I absolutely agree with your statement about how the mistakes are handled.