AFT_B912

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2020 AFTERMARKET 11 Above: Mini Cooper (2001) www.aftermarketonline.net this sits inside a very nice shiny building that is itself surrounded by equally clean and reflective cars. The presentation as described suggests a smooth, bump-free experience. Then we hear a story like this and it all comes crashing down again. Let’s start pulling it apart. One thing the story doesn’t tell you is that the bookings are taken via a calls centre that is based in a remote location, so when the car is booked in, the customer is just a number. Do you know the names of your customers? Of course you do. Do you know the names of their family? Well, they are probably customers too, so yes. Had the dealer known their customer, and their approach, much of this could have been avoided. If a customer generally wants work performed there and then, it is best to tell them about it. If they are used to this treatment and they don’t get offered the option, they will be annoyed. In your garage, do you know how to handle your regular customers as individuals? Some will want all the work carried out using all OE parts. Some will want the job doing as cheaply as possible, if it needs doing at all. You handle the work accordingly. You would think a business that has a serious management system could handle this. In this case, you would be wrong. Leaving the service light on is not a major issue, but this really should not have happened. When it did, suggesting to the customer that they bring it back themselves is pretty insulting. The job had been left unfinished, and it was being implied that they could not be bothered to properly see it through. Then there’s the tyre. Leaving a service light on is irritating, but minor. Putting the wrong tyre on the car, after having deliberately ordering the correct one in, and then billing for said correct tyre, that’s bad. On the one hand, there is the safety side of things. Putting an odd tyre on will impede the grip, and it will affect braking. The fact that the customer picked up on it but the dealer did not is extremely bad. Of course, it could be twice as bad, in that there might have been another driver that ended up with the P Zero meant for our reader’s regular customer. Did they complain as well? Did they even notice? Not all motorists are as engaged or interested in their vehicle. After all of this, one has to ask if the service actually took place. I am sure you can imagine such an argument taking place at your garage, after such a monumental cock-up. Beyond that though, is the follow-up. The dealer asked for feedback, and got it in spades. All bad, and all in public. They then left it there for days on end. If you had a customer who was clearly getting angrier by the day posting on your Facebook page, would you call them? Surely, if you wanted feedback, you might just ask them. The customer here actually had to call the dealer to point out all the negative feedback they were providing. Once the situation was rectified, the customer could have been asked to update their Facebook post to reflect how the situation was resolved. Alternatively, the staff member responsible for social media could have taken the posts down. Neither option was taken. We had a look when we were writing up this piece, and the feedback is still there. Now, the dealer’s service manager was the one bright spot in this entire situation, and he clearly had the right approach and the right attitude. He communicated with the aggrieved customer, and used the tools at his disposal, namely their DMS to ascertain some background on the customer, and then to look into what had happened. He then came up with a solution, namely the follow-up work would be free for the customer. That’s great for him, but again, if this happened at your garage, do you want to be carrying out free work to placate angry customers? Can you afford to do work for free? Perhaps once or twice to the second question, but it would be best to avoid having to do so in the first place. Conclusions Mystery shopping can be a very useful process. It can really show where your shortcomings are. The Top Garage judges use it as part of their arsenal of tools to gauge where a garage sits in the rankings. If we sent Andy Savva, or Dave Massey, or John Batten to a Top Garage contestant, and this was the result, how do you think they would fare in the competition? We would guess they wouldn’t do so well. If you go through this article, and make sure you don’t do what the dealer did, up until the point they had to make it up to the customer, then you should be on the right track. As a smaller business, you have many strengths. You are closer to your customers, you can react to their needs, and more importantly you probably know what their needs were in the first place. Yours is a brilliant business, shout it from the roof, and make sure your customers, and potential customers hear you.