I’ve just returned from a four day round trip to Florida after having endured a seriously annoying vibration from the front end of my award-winning minivan. This after arranging a pre-trip rotation/balance/alignment at my award-winning dealership. As I hover over the manufacturer’s service-visit survey (which was waiting for me upon my return), my pen hand freezes over the checkboxes. One little tick might just result in the castration of the technician responsible for my tingling hands and inflamed attitude. I can foretell the reaction from survey central. Oh….My…Heavens! A survey rating of LTP [Less than perfect] has been submitted! Activate the GO TEAM!
These days, any visit to a manufacturer-branded service department invariably leads to a customer survey. As you pick up your vehicle, all hands on the service deck make a cloying and pathetic plea for “excellent” ratings. From the service “host” to the cashier with the mysteriously low-cut and tight attire, they all “remind” you that “five is the highest score” on the walkout survey incorporated into the service receipt. Uh, sure. Thanks. Their lobbying is creepy, intrusive and inherently unethical, and it doesn’t end there…
Within hours, a letter from the dealership arrives with a heads-up: a manufacturer’s survey or (worse) phone call is headed your way. The dealer staff’s continued employment depends entirely on your providing “only the highest rating” ticks on every question. Further, if you feel unable to make these bubbly, effusively positive post-visit comments, you are despicably evil human filth– I mean, could you please give the service manager the basic courtesy of discussing your concerns with him prior to any negative assessments you might consider sharing with the brand’s customer relations monitors?
So am I to call my dealership and discuss how to get adhesive wheel weights to stick on uncleaned wheels? Or more fun yet, tender the suggestion that maybe their highly trained technicians just did the rotation, figured the tires looked good enough and skipped the whole balancing procedure? Or somehow blew the highly lasered and automated alignment process?
And I’ll still have to leave my vehicle– again– for a few hours. If I want to avoid death by People magazine, I’ll have to rent a car (the only loans my dealer makes involve interest payments and lots of ‘em). Moreover, I’ll face a repeat round of surveys, which could trigger another cycle of false feedback: “Was the service department friendly and courteous while correcting the mistake they shouldn’t have made the first time?”
Please. Car companies should not allow their dealerships’ personnel to brow-beat their customers with the potential consequences of an honest consumer report. The dealership should simply ask the owner if the dealer’s service was up to snuff and be done with it. If it turns out that they screwed up, the service department needs to suck it up and take the beating they deserve. Yes, they should be allowed the opportunity to fix their screw-ups. But using emotional blackmail to manipulate their esteemed customers into ziplipification– even if they attempt to “correct” problems later– enables substandard procedures to persist. It’s a win – lose situation.
Maybe we should have some responses ready for these situations. When the service department toady helpfully informs us that “five is the highest rating” we should ask,”Given that five is an odd number, what’s an average score?” When they tell us “If you can’t give us the highest possible ratings on every question, please contact our service department Manager immediately” we should counter “Wouldn’t that render the survey statistically insignificant, in that it would be an aberration of the sigma-six design coefficient theories outlined in Johansson’s seminal work “Survey and Assessment-Instrument Compilation for the Twenty-First Century Customer?”
Of course, there is no such book. But being able to cite it with authority will glaze every sub-erudite eye for miles. And when the ever-so-helpful service folk overdo the gluteal-kissing with cheerful placards and/or five cent mints, remember that they really do want you to be satisfied. So tell them you’d like to be allowed to complete all future surveys without hectoring, pleading, bargain basement bribery and cynical mind games. Or, more comprehensibly, “piss off.”
And when you take your car in for a warranty recall, simple service or minor repair, and they put your steering wheel back on off-center, or get oil all over your engine cover, or fail to get the door fascia on properly, or over-torque the lug nuts, tell the manager about it and get things put right ASAP. And then report the hassles on the ensuing surveys. At the same time, manufacturers must do whatever they can to put an end to this charade. They should mystery shop their dealers’ service departments or survey customers on pre-survey shenanigans. The truth hurts guys. Get used to it.
Well, this makes me happy that I take my cars (two Porsches, one new, and an Audi) to a nearby independent shop that specializes in German cars when I have a problem that I can’t fix myself, since I do all my own routine servicing and did even when the Audi was covered for that under warranty. No “surveys” there.
Sure, I’d take the new Porsche to the dealer if there was a problem covered by warranty, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a warranty problem on a new car.
My mother–a building contractor in her younger days–always used to say, “If you want something done right, do it yourself.”
Stephan Wilkinson
My philosophy is “if you can’t handle the answer, don’t ask the question.”
It’s not just the service departments that hassle you about survey scores. I recently bought a new car. Before we could get off the lot with our purchase the sales staff had reminded us at least three times that anything less than the absolute highest ratings would result in their decapitation or worse. Then before the survey arrived in the mail I got 2 phone calls and the requisite letter. I began to wonder if they were so insecure and unsure about their customer service abilities they felt they had to beg for mercy.
When the survey finally arrived I tossed it in the trash. If I’m not going to be allowed to provide honest feedback and am being pressured to skew the results in one direction or the other, the survey becomes irrelevant and I won’t participate. Now I’m halfway expecting a survey asking why I didn’t complete the survey.
Great piece, Mr. Weir! Having just bought a car, I’ve been experiencing the same thing you’re describing: the calls, the letters, the plaintive appeals for my trust. One note to add: back in 2001, I took my wife’s VW in for service to a dealership in the new city to which we had recently moved. Of course, the survey call followed shortly. When I went back the next time, the service writer said, “I see that you gave us all top marks following your last service visit. Thank you.” Wow, was that ever offputting. Why in the world does VW of North America share specific survey replies with their dealerships? Talk about stifling honest feedback. As another commenter noted, I’ve been taking her car to independent shops ever since.
I bought a WRX in 2001. On thanksgiving night, 2005, a kid rear-ended me. After I got the car out of the shop, I drove to the same dealer, found the same sales guy and bought a 2006 WRX.
I mentioned to him that I no longer lived in the area, but I am returning 5 years later to make the same purchase, using the car he sold me as a trade in — what would he do for me?
Nothing.
He sold me the car and only gave me $4,000 for the ’01 Scoobie.
He did, however, follow me to my new car and tell me about the survey and how important high marks are.
If I were a better man, I would have said, “I asked for $8,000 on the trade in, right?”
Instead, I just nodded.
I recently had an experience like this myself. After realizing why VW need to fire every single dealer if it plans to sell cars over $40,000, I got–literally–FIFTY phone calls from some mysterious phone number that I did not associate with anyone I cared about. When I finally answered, it was the VW customer satisfaction whatevers.
Of course, I had been reminded mere seconds after being told the third thing they couldn’t do for me that only the highest score on this call would help them, and that I agree to try and call them first.
I told the guy on the phone to send anyone who wants to sell a high-end Passat or Touareg to get a video camera, notepad, and head over to the Lexus dealer and copy them.
After getting the car home (and having the subject constantly changed by the dealer) I tried to get my local dealer to replace the XM receiver with the Sirius head unit.
“Can’t do that. They’re hard wired.”
A google and an internet transaction later, I had the part and changed it out myself in about five minutes.
They too will get no 5s.
It’s hillarious how dealership salesmen plea like that, especially when you don’t like what they have to offer, and you start to walk out of the dealership.
Then that same salesman and the sales manager chases you and gets you to come back, with the price you want.
beautiful piece and totally agree with the others on vw’s lamentable efforts in providing decent customer service. i’m praying for the follow up phone call/mailer! if i do a shitty job at my work, i expect to get fired – why wouldn’t these schmucks?
I had an extremely similar experience recently. I put new wheels and tires on my 2005 Nissan 350z. The steering wheel was shaking at around 70mph and the car pulled to the right. It needed an alignment and balance. I had heard that because of the complexity of the suspension that the dealership was the best place to go for one. So I took it to the dealership.
When I picked it up, none of the problems had been fixed. Worse still, the steering wheel had to be turned to the right for the car to drive straight. So not only did they fix nothing, but they made it WORSE. Three trips later, and now the steering wheel is straight again, but it still pulls to the right and vibrates like a weedwhacker. I paid them just over $100 for this.
I finally took it to a specialty wheel and tire shop. They roadforce balanced the wheels for $40 and that fixed the problems. The dealership sent me a letter pleading to give them a call if I wasn’t satisfied with their service. I haven’t recieved a survey yet but you can be sure I’ll give them the marks they deserve.
I think that most of the time a shop or dealership really wants things to be right with the world. I have found that polite, stern complaints generally get very good results.
The best example I have is from a very unpleasant experience at my local Porsche dealership, the details of which I’ll spare everyone. I called the service manager, explained the situation, and told them “With the reputation of the cars you sell, I frankly expect a higher and more professional level of service from you and would like to be able to come back to you next time I am in the market for Porsche. What can you do to resolve this issue?” I ended up getting my problem fixed the next day, and also got 3 free oil change/maintenance visits out of them for my trouble.
I also own a 2006 Passat and heard terrible stories about VW service shortly after I bought it, but my experience to date with them has been very good. They even replaced some interior trim that I accidentally broke under warranty, which they certainly didn’t have to do. They are still getting used to working on the new Passats, but they’ve always addressed their small mistakes or lack of understanding promptly, and always say “thanks for your business”. In the wider world of broad incompetence I really appreciate that.
Great article (OK, perhaps more of a whinge than an article, but refreshing nonetheless). I’ve recently been through the same experience with VW and BMW, and am currently being harassed by Infiniti to bring my car in for a 3750 mile service. This brings up another interesting point – the ‘free’ service interval with my BMW was usually around 10K-11K (decided by the trip computer), but I’m being pushed to pay for servicing at Infiniti every 3750 miles. Hmmm.
And yes, I’ve given 2, 3, and 4 out of five where it was warranted in the past, and I’ve received the expected ‘We’re very disappointed’ follow up call. Unfortunately it’s cheaper to brow beat customers into giving full marks than it is to raise standards to a point where full marks are deserved.
Great article. I have a dealer story that related so well to this article. When I bought my Mazda, I was told by the sales person that I would be receiving the survey on my buying experience and that if there was any reason I couldn’t rate them as a 5 – exceptional, then they wanted to talk to me about it beforehand. It’s the same story everyone else here has said.
Where the story gets interesting though, is that they offered to give me a free oil change if I would give them my uncompleted survey form when it came in the mail and allow them to complete it for me. As they told me, it wouldn’t be a problem to do that since I would be rating them with 5’s across the board anyway. I thought this was so highly unethical that it made me regret even buying a car from this dealership. Needless to say, I completed the survey myself and they didn’t get all 5’s from me. I think I can afford to pay for an oil change when I need one.
It’s the perverse incentives. Once upon a time, someone had the brilliant idea of linking rewards for their customer staff to ratings by customers.
The problem here is that a) The staff know that, and b) In some of these cases, the dealership staff are administering the response forms.
You have created a situation where the staff have nothing to lose by grovelling if they think you’ll give them a bad rating anyway.
As far as I can see, the only way to handle it is have the administration of the customer-response severed from the actual dealer personnel except when it is time to receive their results. (Anonymous forms would help, no doubt)
Mr. Weir, I completely agree with how moronic many dealers are, but I never hesitate to rate service poorly if it was.
At the local GM dealer, the service we receive is generally miserable. Recently, while in for an oil change, a service dept worker repeatedly told us it would only be ’10 more minutes’, when he was repeatedly reminded that we had an urgent appointment we needed to be at, and our appointment was running overtime.
At the Ford dealer when we were looking for a minivan, the salesman kept us waiting for over a half hour by ourselves in his office while he ‘talked to the manager’ about the price on a van we were looking at, after saying he would be back in about 5 mins.
On the other hand, when we bought an Olds minivan from Stevens Creek Toyota, we were so impressed with the speed, efficiency, and courtesy of the sales rep we faxed in a letter of appreciation to his sales manager. He actually gave the impression of working for us, and got us the price we asked for, and didn’t keep us waiting all night.
Ann effective survey would include a place to write down the name of the person who helped you, and have direct consequences to the person (whether good or bad).
As a service advisor at a high end German manufacturers dealership, I can tell you these surveys can, at some dealerships, make a VERY big difference in how we get paid – a single bad survey out of many returned in 3 out of the six months this year has cost me several thousand dollars so far this year. The 4 100 percent scores i get are ruined by the one 35 percent i get from, ” I didn’t buy a (fancy german car) so that I could get a Kia Rio loaner”. “My salesman never told me i’d have to pay for brake pads / oil changes / regular maintenance”? Don’t blame me, ma’am, for being the messenger – blame your salesman, blame the maufacturer, write to them, but understand – rate my service, what I do for YOU, not what others may not do.
Um, your maintenance indicator on your Infiniti is adjustable. The default value is 3750 for oil change; I changed mine to 5000 miles since I use Mobile 1 synthetic in my FX. I, too, find it funny that when you pay for the maintenance, the maintenance frequency is rather high, but when the dealer fronts for the cost, the frequency is rather low.
My previous 2002 S4 was scheduled for an oil change every 7500 (if I remember correctly), but I would usually change it every 5000 miles for piece of mind.
I am a service advisor in a GM dealership and have also been a service advisor in an import dealership and can tell you these surveys generally can affect our pay. A 4out of 5 is a failure, a very satisfied is a failure unfortunately, but we do not design the survey nor send them out, it is the manufacturers!
If we give you bad service by all means call me, come in and yell at me, whatever-I will try to fix your concern but if you HATE YOUR CAR, or it was poorly engineered or is defective and I give you excellent service tick the correct boxes for the car and for the employees. If we at the dealership screw up then by all means we deserve poor ratings but if we jump through hoops for you and your car has an odd noise that only happens under the cover of darkness on a full moon don’t blame the service department but help us find the problem.
We are trying to fix the car for you, we did not design, engineer or build the car. Comment on the correct problem — employee or car!
Unfortunately we are judged on these scores and they can affect our jobs! One writer commented how they expected to be fired if they screwed up but if the did their job 90% or their clients were very satisfied not completely satisfied do they expect to be fired?
If you do good service, then you can expect to be given good marks. So let me ask you Mr. Service Advisor, if you do acceptable work, do you truly believe that 4/5 stars is warranted? Thats 80%, a commendable score. In order to receive 5/5 stars (a perfect 100%), you have to go beyond just acceptable.
Deliver the car when promised. If you can not do this, then comp a rental.
FIX THE PROBLEM THE FIRST TIME. People do not want to have to come back 3 and 4 times for the same problem. It leaves us with the impression that you have monkeys turning wrenches in the same manner that most car mags (cough R&T) have monkeys banging on typewriters.
The customers car is not your mechanics toy. I once picked up my old 350z and it smelled of french fries inside. My seat was pushed all the way back and my radio stations were changed. At another dealership, my car had an additional 30 miles on the odometer…..
You damage the car when in your car, you fix it at your (dealerships) dime. Scuffed wheels are a huge source of frustration for many customers, especially those with expensive aftermarket wheels. Most customers are honest and do not check for damage when picking up the car. While I understand the need to limit liability, if they come back to you within 24 hours with a damage complaint, then don’t heckle them. Chances are your boffins in back did indeed damage them.
There are far fewer good service departments than bad. Once you go to a place that offers exemplary service, you wonder why you ever put up with the other shops.
After getting my wife’s Mini serviced at the local dealer they followed up the next day and offered us a gift certificate if we responded with positive ratings to the survey that Mini USA was bound to send us. I asked her if it was normal dealership practice to try to bribe their way to better service ratings and if it was cheaper than actually providing better service and she just said ‘they just love to reward their customers’. Despite having had a lousy buying experience there this dealer, it rates very highly according to Mini USA. I wonder why?
Do not be surprised when the expected survey form does NEVER arrive……
Depending on your interaction at the dealership with the service writer, the manager or the owner (if need be) and this initial outcome of that negociation and reaction to it.
Should (for some reason) the coddle factor have missed its mark, the customer seen flying into a pre-adolescent tantrum or the coffee was too strong, “precocious”service customers data gets pre-emtively “altered” to an address closer to Katmandu……….
A service writer strives to reach a 95% customer satisfaction rate whether the customer likes the offered service or not. Most of the time as an incentive the writer gets an extra $$ amount each month when he reaches this percentage. Other dealers give company cars for commuting.
Depending on how many customers the writer sees, on average 20 a day, it is hard to be everything to everybody. The guy coming in for his 5,000 miles complimentary oil change is easyier satisfied then the one that you have to brake the news to, that his car needs a new timing belt with the 90,000 mile service.
Service writers DO work on commission. For every quart of oil, for every nut and bolt, every relay and wire for every man hour the writer gets a slice. Seasoned writers with years of experience on average make as much as 5 times what the rookie sitting in the office next to them earns, while seeing the same amount of customers. Because they have their routine down, up-sale speech flowing like heavy duty oil, offering services and parts to unsuspecting customers with the conviction of a network TV weatherman.
When you call in for a service appointment, the internal struggle for preferred customers at the dealership begins. The phone operator is gaugeing you out for what type of service you are coming in. Routine maintenance or something out of schedule, mileage of your car and prior visits etc.
Most phone operators ALSO get a $ for every sales/service appointment they make, where the customer actually shows up. Beside from this practice, they are also “open” for little $$ incentives from afore mentioned seasoned service writer, slipping them the most promising new customers with up-sale possibilities. If the customer is an existing one, and his regular service writer is not available or moved on, the operator might not put the customer back in the “who’s up” pool but “assign” him to the company vulture .
Usually the service writer gives their service contract to a shop manager responsible for a team of 5 – 6 workers. If there are 4 service writers there are mostly 2 shop managers delegating work to 4 technicians teams.
These teams too, compete against each other. The techicians “inform” the shop managers of what else they have noticed on the car that needs attention. The shop manager gets in touch with the service writer who then informs the customer, who’s car is already apart,about the other “pressing repairs”. 9 out of 10 customers agree to the extra work. Note: neither the shop manager nor the writer have seen the car in the service bay.
Normally, the team with the most work for the week and their shop manager get free lunch for the upcomming week. Only, it is not really FREE, the customers that got the “good news, bad news” call ends up more then paying for it. The most experienced technicians tend to flock to the shop manager who’s writers give him the most demanding (means man hours) work. If you get the rookie service writer, you therefore also get the least experienced worker on your car or the laziest ones…
That openes another can of worms: Punctuality! Who among us has not spent half a day at the dealer waiting for a serviced car, that was promised for 2 p.m. yet was not finished at even 5 p.m.??
That problem stems from the dealer trying to fit 40lbs of sand in a 20lbs bag. The service center can handle let’s say 80 cars a day, including some over nighters, waiting for parts. The writers accept 100 cars a day for service…. Instant time conflict. The most lucrative work is gobbled up right away during the day, The guy with the oils change or brake job, no matter what time the car was brought in, goes on the back burner. LITERALLY, until the customer walks in the dealership, ready to pick up his car!! Then a service bay gets hastely cleared, the shouting starts and mechanics get rousted from other jobs to clear the (perceived) pain in the @… out of here in NASCAR double time!!!! The consequences for the survey, getting it in the hands of a guy/gal fed up waiting with so much stale coffee and Ophrah for entertainment are predictable………….
All this and more of the same, can be experienced on a daily bases in living colors at your trusted Lexus of Manhattan Dealership, if you do not believe me.. Just do not ask for their long time service writer called Val, he moved on to a bigger better dealer in Long Island that knows how to treat its customers right.
Val
Doug,
You’ve obviously struck a nerve. It is unfortunate but not surprising to see so many weigh in on this issue. The OEMs waste millions of dollars every year on this counter-productive exercise. Their dealers waste orders of magnitude more in man hours finagling false positives. Admittedly, everyone involved in the process has good intentions. The manufacturers want satisfied customers who will remain loyal to their brand. The dealers want satisfied customers who will spread positive word of mouth and return for service. The survey companies want to produce valid responses for their clients. Yet, there are two structural issues that transform all those good intentions into paving bricks on the road to hell.
1) OEMs do not own their product distribution channel
2) OEM marketing departments manage the survey process
Manufacturers are prohibited by state laws from owning or exerting owner privilege over their dealers. This prohibits the OEMs from managing problems at specific dealerships with direct action. Instead, they can only set up uniform incentive programs that invariably create unintended consequences. Other than revoking a franchise, which requires years of expensive legal battles, the OEMs can only offer carrots (more ad coop, inventory preferences, ???certification??? programs) or sticks (poor allocation, higher floor plan rates, less ad money). With the current margins on commoditized new cars, these incentives often mean the difference between profit and loss. A local dealer is going to try whatever he can think of to make his satisfaction targets, even if it means the survey results are meaningless.
Why would the OEMs continue to pay millions each year for a program that creates bogus data and pisses off customers? The answer is reason #2. Marketing owns the customer satisfaction survey process, and the results of the surveys find their way into advertising copy and press releases. The survey results could provide valuable insights into process or product improvements that could make the company stronger in the future. However, as long as Mazda is claiming 95% customer satisfaction, Honda and Chevy are going to use every trick in the book to match or beat that.
Since state franchise laws aren???t changing any time soon, the only remedy for this situation is to reorganize the customer satisfaction research process. This is actually pretty easy since the OEMs outsource all the surveying to companies like Maritz, Synovate, and JD Power. It???s really just a matter of moving the budget authority. When a dealer with a bad score seeks help from the OEM, his call currently gets forwarded to some junior research analyst fresh out of school who tells him to talk sweet to his customers and fix stuff for free. The dealers who get this ???support??? from the OEMs soon stop wasting their time trying to fix things and succumb to the ???beg for scores??? game everyone else is playing. But imagine if the dealer calling the OEM for help was instead connected to a inventory specialist who could help them optimize their parts mix to reduce repair times, or a design engineer who could use repeated reports of the same break down to issue a recall, or a process engineer who could share best practices observed at other dealerships. If the manufacturers stopped worrying about advertising bogus satisfaction numbers, they could dispense with the incentives to generate them. Encouraging customers to give honest feedback would produce meaningful data that would allow a true diagnosis.
While we wait for the OEMs to either figure this out or go broke, keep encouraging everyone to ignore the pleas and give honest feedback on their surveys.
Sat Man.
The longterm answer, at least where it benefits customer satisfaction is OEM owned dealerships, like all luxury manufacturer maintain in Germany (Niederlassungen).
Mercedes and BMW own their Dealerships over private franchise owners at a ratio to 4:1, with these private ones having ties to the manufacturer back to the ’50 and performing at/above OEM level. Lately (since the ’90) more and more OEM follow suit, even foreign ones with dramatic improvement. Independent car magazines are going in randomly with “mock” service appointments, where the vehicle is rigged with up to 10 malfunctions to see how many the deler rectifies. The results are published. Very effevctive tool.
Survey’s are issue throughout and customer satisfaction (unaltered) generally very high since the OEM can exercise real pressure on underperforming Dealerships, with drastic management changes as needed.
Let’s face it:MOST independend dealerships here in the US are run boiler room style like something right out of “The Cadillac Man” with Robin Williams.
Many proclaim that they are: OWNED AND OPERATED BY ONE CARING FAMILY. (cough) They are not fit to run a pizza parlor, let alone a dealership.
The group that owns my pet peeve, Lexus of Manhattan, owns 20 different dealeships representing 14(!!) different manufacturers. Most still in the “good old fashioned” tradition of multiple brands under one roof.
Case in point. Goos service cannot and will not come from this.
I’d like to use this opportunity to compliment my local Subaru dealership. My experience with their service department has been a 5 of 5. Their practice is as follows:
1. Before you leave the dealership, you are casually asked if you are satisfied usually by the service manager.
2. Between 2 days and a week later you receive a phone call from someone at the dealership asking if you are still satisfied or if any new problems came up. Again, everything is very casual.
No pressure at all. No surveys.
The one time that I was not satisfied (the problem came back after 2 days) I was caught by the phone call before I had a chance to call them. The service manager called me back within 45 minutes, helped to diagnose the problem over the phone and scheduled an appointment for me to bring the car in.
Maybe it is because I treat the dealership with some respect, after all they SHOULD be certified on and able to work on my car, or maybe my dealership is an exception to the rule.
Mr KTM,
All I ask is you rate your car and service advisor as separate items. And yes I do personally go above and beyond, I have personally delivered cars to customer’s homes well afterhours, unpaid, picked up customer’s cars on sundays, met them at the deakership before we open to give them loaners or rentals. And I never bribe my customers with gimmicks or threats, just rate the car and the service separately. If you have had bad experiences with food, radio stations changed etc then by all means complain and yell at your service department or rate them poorly, they deserve it. If the problem lies with your car-rate the car. I don’t agree with the 80% being a fail but that is the MANUFACTURER setting this standard not the service department.
On another note I will only allow customers to wait if they make their appt for when we open at 7am, that way I can guarantee a tech will be available immediately. Otherwise it will be ready when I promise it for you-or I will give you a rental, taxi, delivery,whatever…without customers I am out of work. And you will only tell your friends the bad experiences because they make good stories, good customer service stories are boring. And be realistic when you make your appt, don’t add 10 items when you come in if you only made an appt for an oil change that is where the ‘extra 20lbs of sand come in’.
thank you
I’ve read these comments and will be quite blunt with mine. I have been in the car biz over 30 years always in the service dept, though I have personally sold many of my most respected customers vehicles to better suit their needs. I was on the top 20 list for most preferred technician for over 20 years and a service advisor for the last 12 years and I have watched this industry go through many changes as well as the staff who works in it. Now, since people (customers) have been educated in manipulating surveys to meet their needs I can tell you this …(and I have been right so far). It wont be long before there will be NO techicians to work on your vehicles and the quality of those who are is on the decline, and so, we must work with what we have in the best way we know how. I personally do NOT push the good survey thingie.. I know I am providing the best possible service to YOU and YOUR vehicle. Both service advisors AND Technicians have become a commodity and actively sought after. So have a little compassion and patience while there, if there is not someone in the bathroom to hand you a towel, or the coffee is more than a hour old, or the wrong channel is on the tv, or there is too many steps to the waiting room, or the courtesy driver forgot his deodorant, or our loaner only has 3/4 tank of gas, and well you get the hint…please dont blame me…I’m busy trying to get you and 30 other people’s cars done in a timely manner. Schedule your own life,dont make me responsible to get your uncle’s-cousin’s-brother’s-next door neighbor’s-son to the doctor! Yes, this happens over and over! Think about the vehicle you bought! If you have a rattle every blue moon in your 4WD -OFF ROAD vehicle, the same attention to suspension tuning is not the same as a luxury car! I work for a great company, our CRM is independant of the company and contacts the customer in a relaxing manner. I do agree with you in the aspect of having the in-house (net-promoter) survey thrown in your face at the cashier-pick-up window, very unnerving I agree and hope to see that change soon at our dealership. I say these things in the face of reality as I have a huge-huge customer following that speaks for itself, so please remember it has become tougher and tougher to get your vehicle too 100 percent of expectations and not about to get better, keep your car maintained properly and treat us like your friend… we are not the enemy…
By-the-way, I see a product line moving very quickly to the top in quality and reliability which may just shock all of you in the next few years… dont be surprised, and you can bet I will be there!