Lose the “Can do no wrong” attitude
I often write about customer service experiences that I have had in my personal life because I know that they are just as applicable to aviation department managers who read D.O.M.magazine. This month is no exception.
I have two 2013 vehicles from Ford that were the subject of a recall campaign. The issue was that the engines in the vehicles were leaking coolant, which resulted in engine overheating because of the low coolant levels. Neither of my cars were leaking coolant, but I still took them in for inspection in compliance with the recall campaign.
After my cars were returned to me, I noticed the coolant levels in both vehicles kept going down, and I now needed to add coolant about once a week because of it. Both cars were now leaking.
I took one of the cars back to the dealer for them to inspect. The dealer told me that there was a leak in the thermostat housing, and since the recall was complied with and since my car was just out of warranty (with more than 50,000 miles on it), the cost to repair the leak would be more than $600.
Needless to say, something was fishy here. My cars were both fine before the recall work, but I was now looking at more than $1,200 worth of work to “correct” problems that, to me, were obviously caused by the dealer’s work on my cars! To add insult to injury, the dealer charged me $40 just to inspect the car and provide me with a quote. (I was told the $40 would be returned if I had them repair the leaks.)
At this point, I decided to email Ford about my problem. Fortunately, Ford’s customer service department returned my e-mail and made arrangements to review the entire situation. After a quick review, they agreed that the leakage was related to the recall and agreed to fix it at no charge.
During the repair work (that would have cost me $600 if I had not complained), it was discovered that a gasket that had been replaced during the recall inspection was leaking — thereby validating that the leakage was indeed the result of the initial recall work. In the end, the service department at the Ford dealer was at fault for this entire fiasco. Amazingly, the dealer never admitted to being responsible for the problem, nor did they ever offer to compensate me for the costs that I had incurred as a result of their errors.
I’m out the $40 inspection fee, two days without my vehicles, my personal time fighting the repair costs, and another $44 for a thermostat housing that I purchased while intending to do the $600 repair myself.
Because of this dealer’s arrogant “can do no wrong” attitude, I will no longer take my vehicles to them. I’ll either seek out another dealer or avoid dealerships altogether. If they had just stood back for a second and accepted that they might have done something wrong, the problem would have been promptly fixed, and I would have been a satisfied customer. If the dealer (Ford in my instance) had considered that perhaps they had not done the inspection/repair correctly in the first place, they could have corrected the problem, apologized, and offered me an oil change or other small consideration for my troubles. Instead, they fought tooth and nail to avoid being responsible for their own mistakes and ended up losing the cost of the repair in the short run, and losing a customer in the long run.
Issues such as customer satisfaction and future business are important regardless of the industry.
Does this situation sound familiar? Do you consider the customer complaint and review your work before blaming someone else? Or do you assume some other cause of the problem before reviewing your work? Let me know your thoughts.
Greg Napert
Publisher, D.O.M.magazine