I drove into the car service department at my appointed time and waited 10 minutes before the tech came out with his clipboard. He nicely apologized for being late, checked my mileage and then told me I was here for a recall.
I said “I thought there was an expected service as well”.
He said “no, just the recall. With EV’s, there is almost no service. But, in 5000 miles you will need to be back to have your tires rotated.”
“Ok”, I said “can you fix this seat attachment that keeps falling off because the seal has delaminated?”
He chuckled, and said “we can’t fix it, but here is how others customers have fixed it for themselves”.
“Uh, ok. Just to confirm, you will wash the car before I pick it up, right?”
“Oh, no”, he chuckled again. “We stopped doing that. We had a customer sue us for scratches that we didn’t do. We ended up settling for $40,000 and now we don’t wash the cars.”
I call this customer “dis”-service. What would you call it? In this economy, where most of my Vistage Members have their heads down fighting hard to retain their customers and working hard to earn the trust of new prospects, THIS is NOT how you win! I was not angry at the young man at the dealership. I mostly like my car and cars are way too expensive to change out on a whim. But, the case is building to get a different brand when my lease is up next March.
How often is this happening in your organization? Are you setting up your customer service or customer experience team to be a “dis” service team? Or, is there one person on your team that no one wants to interact with? It isn’t just the tone of the conversation, it is is the content. Are you helping or not? The very nice guy at the dealership gave me 3 unexpected no’s.
This week, take a look at the “dis”service going on in your organization and address it. It won’t go away by itself.
If you are not a subscriber to BIZPIE blog, you can subscribe here. If you want to learn more about Vistage, click here.