I think you are confusing craftsmanship and maximally profitable business practices.
If you are in a business with long enough buying cycles that there are basically no repeat buyers providing poor after sales service is frequently the most profitable choice. Yes you lose out on some repeat buyers who get a bad product, and they get a minimal level of after sales support from you so you are their last choice should they buy a second once in a lifetime brand new home. If you do a great job you probably still aren’t their first choice, the first choice is someone who has a partway built home in the area they are interested in.
You get some negative recommendations from buyer’s friends (“don’t buy from KB homes they didn’t blah-blah-blah my basement”), which sometimes people actually act on, if they have a choice, but in a line of business where after market support is already not much of a positive most or al of your competitors already don’t have good support so everyone else is crap and odds are all the choices the customer has have negative recommendations and it is all a wash.
Maybe if the customer is lucky the end up in a field like moving companies where “red ball moving” actually tries hard not to screw things up and does what they can to make it right, but also has like 3x the price of the fly by night companies. Or in computers Apple actually really tries for customer satisfaction, even going above and beyond on warranty service sometimes (“look it is out of warranty, but I searched our records and that particular iMac had a hard drive that fails more frequently then it should, but your disk’s serial number falls outside the range, it is probably fine, but they do give me the authority to grant you a free out of warranty repair and I want to make that happen, so lets just assume maybe HP made a few to many bad disks a little later as well and cover this for free”). Is it worth the price premium they charge in the first place? Maybe, maybe not, certainly the extra dollars mostly are not funding “real customer support”, but they do spend some of it on that.
(second example, the “fat iPod nano” after people owned them for a while started getting a crackling sound, m out died inside a year. The warranty was six months. Turns out a subcontractor ignored the specs for a surface mount capacitor and gave his brother’s factor the business and bought substandard caps that dried out and died. It is super hard to conduct lawsuit against suppliers in China, and many companies that manufacture abroad try to wiggle out of that sort of responsibility and at the very least only replace things that get reported in the warrantee period, and sometimes try to make that hard (“take a video of the product, a single continuous video showing the serial number and play the sound loud enough to hear the crackling on the recording…” “no, you had the sound too loud it was distorted, try again” “no, can’t hear it not enough volume…”). Apple’s policy for that product was to replace them all. In warrantee, out of warrantee. Anyone that had an issue (and were in or near the range of dates that had the issue) with one got a replacement. The replacements all had the right cap. Even after they discontinued it they got a replacement or an equivalent value off of a new iPod, I’ll bet if you have one now you could get a credit off of some other Apple product despite it being like a decade after production has ended)
Apple doesn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts though. They think computer, phone, headphone, and music player customers are potential repeat customers, and they value good customer support as part of a “marketing expense” to make sure they stay top of the list when customers think about buying the next product that Apple makes one of. Not “that iMac was pretty good until it died and then it cost me almost as much to fix as it did to buy in the first place, maybe I’ll try some sort of Dell…” but “that iMac was pretty good, sure it got slow, and then it broke, but they fixed it for free, so I bet if I get another one it might not break and if it does I bet they will fix that one too! Not really worth considering a Dell…” (or at least in Apple’s mind that is the ideal outcome…some people are obviously “it broke, they took a whole week to fix it! Lame! I’m getting a Dell”)
