(Blue387)
Customer service surveys at car dealerships must be serious, serious business. That’s the only conclusion I can draw from Bob’s story about being bullied by the Ford dealership where he bought his Fiesta. They called him up to say that if he planned to rate his (unsatisfactory) service experience as anything but satisfactory, he would be hurting the dealership and practically stealing money out of employees’ pockets and yanking food out of their kids’ mouths. If he didn’t say nice things, the service manager insinuated, the dealership might decide not to service his car at all.
Bob writes:
After multiple attempts at fixing my new Ford Fiesta the dealership said their hands were tied because Ford considers my problems “normal”. The service tech and managers admit that they don’t feel the problems are normal but can’t do anything more because Ford won’t classify them as a problem.
Yesterday the dealership left me a message stating that I’d be receiving a survey and if they request that if you can’t mark it as satisfied with the service to contact them. I did exactly that and spoke with the dealership’s service manager and explained my concerns. He seemed to be understanding but stressed that a bad grade on the survey could affect the service tech’s and service advisor’s “paycheck and future employment”. When I explained that they didn’t really do anything wrong but I couldn’t classify myself as being satisfied he said that a bad survey could affect my ability to get service at his facility in the future and insinuated that I wouldn’t get good service in the future because they would know that I had given them bad marks. He also stated that he could refuse me service in the future. I feel like I’m being blackmailed.
No matter how hard Ford is coming down on them to get good customer service scores, this isn’t an acceptable tactic to reach the magical goal of 100%. At minimum, it sounds like it’s time to find a new dealership for service (assuming that warranty requirements mean that Bob has to go to a dealership to get his car fixed at all.)
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Just shows that both Ford and the dealers are more concerned with numbers than satisfying customers. They would much rather have unsatisfied customers report “great” service and probably buy their next car from anyone but Ford than actually try to make customers happy.
The automakers like Ford, GM, and Chrysler still don’t understand how to make customers happy. I test drove a Chevrolet Malibu last year, and it had vague steering and literally wallowed around corners, the salesman couldn’t figure out how to setup the dashboard (!), and said the deal would only be good until 9 PM (this was at 4;00 in the afternoon). Not surprisingly I didn’t buy the Malibu; I bought a Toyota Corolla instead; handled well, salesman knew the car, decent deal, no pressure.
I would think that this opens up a legal avenue. Record your next call where they say this and then if you ever have a warranty issue take it elsewhere get it fixed and then small claims court to get your money back. Use the call as evidence that Ford made it clear that they weren’t going to honor the warranty properly.
This way you get to stiff them four times. Once by not giving them the money for the repair (via ford), again by making them pay for the repair anyway, again by making them appear in court, and last and the best by the PR loss making them honor their warranties only through court action.
Maybe even a 5th time as Ford would probably have some harsh words for someone pulling that stunt and then getting caught.
When I bought my new Toyota last year, the dealership actually had a framed copy of the survey I would be receiving with “Excellent” checked for everything. They then asked me to make sure I did the same when I received it. I got numerous calls from the salesperson and manager asking how I liked my car and always ended “have you received the survey” and wanting to make sure I was going to rate them excellent. When I received the survey, I filled it out honestly and made comments where I felt they needed to improve.
Pretty much same thing happened to me but only I was told if I was to give the Dealership a bad grade, that I should call the dealership first and talk it out with them to see if they can fix the problems before I submit my survey. Problem is, that I already tried talking to them about my problem with their service and they wouldnt’ & couldn’t do anything about it. Haven’t received the survey yet and it’s been 2 months since service now.
The problem is that if you let a groppling business or employee score them high you are corrupting the data they might use to fix or base their service. So the next time you go to them the same problems will be there.
This happened to me last year when I bought a Fiesta 2011. They hounded me for weeks after to take the damn survey and I never filled it out because I was getting calls 5 to 6 times daily and it was extremely annoying. I also was not satisfied with my sales service because the gentleman I originally began working with wasn’t there the day I came back to actually purchase the car and they insisted I see another sales associate even though I wanted to make the sale with the original salesman I had spoken to.
This is also common practice, by the way. I work for a local retail sports store and they just updated their employee review policy that determines whether or not you keep your job or get your yearly raise of like .10 cents based on customer surveys. We are graded on things that don’t even have to do with half the employees in the store, such as, were you satisfied with the prices. If you continuously get bad reviews when customers fill out their surveys, you are fired or ridiculed. It’s very frustrating because it has nothing to do with the level of service of a particular person but of the level of service of the whole store. Couldn’t use your coupon because it was expired by 6 months? Fill out a negative survey. Fire the cashier that wrung you up. She had nothing to with the company rules but she certainly won’t be working at that store anymore.
Chevrolet dealership is the same way. If you don’t give them 100%, you’re effectively giving them 0% and they can lose their jobs over it, even when it is completely out of their (local) control.
You are being blackmailed. If you don’t give the the proper review then they’ll just screw the next guy too.
And both my Fords were service nightmares.
I use independents and the dealer:
(I prefer to use the dealer but when the cost difference is significant without much advantage I’ll go elsewhere I trust. Also be aware of dealer specials and coupons –they can bring the price down to the point that the dealer isn’t too much more)
1) i use the dealer for oil changes, warranty repairs and most maintenance.
Dealers tend to price their oil changes competitively and other repairs aren’t so significant that I’ve found it a problem (cars are pretty reliable these days).
2) i use a good independent that specializes in my make for things like timing belts and major maintenance (30k,60k,90k).
3) tires i have done at a tire retailer (though i’ve had better alignments from the dealer, so I’ll pay more and get them aligned there).
4) on brakes i think the best “value” (best job for the price) is at an independent.
Two jobs cost much more at the dealer (this is where the hourly difference really adds up). Timing belts and the major servicing (which is mostly a lot of visual inspections). I take the car to a trusted independent for these. For 60k service it was $400 versus $700 and for timing belt it was about $300 cheaper.
Actually, it almost sounds like a soft survey pitch compared to the one I got.
We had to fill out the paper survey in between signing the sales price and getting the warranty pitch & keys. They were perfectly willing to wait until the survey was done ‘right’. Then, I was so ‘horrible’ as to put a comment in the comment box complaining about the survey blackmail, and ended up being refused warranty service when there was a defect with the door handles and A/C. I had to take it to another dealership & get corporate involved to ‘waive’ the requirement for a factory defect (as opposed to repair?) be fixed at the original dealer’s.
Non-dealer car repair shops do this too. I rated one 9/10 after an insurance paid repair, since they called me at 12:00 to tell me my car was ready, and I could pick it up anytime that day, I verified that it would be okay to pick up after work, went at 5:00… and the car wasn’t done, but they still let me turn in the rental at the repair place expecting to get my car back. Apparently deducting just 1 point for wasting my time on a lie was just going to ruin everything, and required endless phone calls complaining.
My local BMW/MINI dealership does the same thing. “Anything less than 10 is a failure for us, so please give us 10s!” They even have gigantic signs proclaiming their precious-as-air need for 10s on the survey.
This annoys me to no end, and I think the survey utterly becomes crap since I’m really not in a position to share my honest opinion.
If they’re hurting that badly, there’s no way they’re going to refuse to service your car. NO WAY. Also, make sure to mention in the survey how rude the service manager was to you when you expressed your concerns.
It’s entirely possible that despite the fact that the dealership has done all they can do (according to Ford) to fix OP’s Fiesta, Ford will punish the dealership for being unable to solve the customer’s problem.
Essentially, Ford should be blamed for not recognizing these “common” Fiesta problems as being anything more pressing (and for not giving its dealers the ability to do more for the drivers who have these problems), but is instead passing the blame onto the dealer (who isn’t at fault.)
This reminds me (sort of…) of the time I went to Old Navy, got one of those customer service survey receipts and the girl told me “If you rate me all 10s you’ll get a 10% off coupon!” when the receipt clearly stated filling out the survey AT ALL would grant me the 10% off coupon. I even called her on it to her face and she insisted it would only work if I rated her all 10s. Needless to say, I completed the survey, gave her all 0s, called corporate and informed them of the store’s shady practices (the store is really a dump compared to other ONs I’ve been to anyways) and happily used my 10% coup online. Haven’t seen her working there since. Do I feel bad? Nope.
Wow, I must have totally screwed the local Toyota dealership.
I don’t remember how I rated them overall, but every item was mid to lower in rating. I was HONEST about the experience helping my daughter purchase her first new car.
It’s a decent dealership, but I didn’t care for some of the sales persons tactics in selling the car to my daughter before I was there to help her decide. It worked out OK, but I’m not sure I’ll visit that dealer again, our two cars were purchased there.
i think its ridiculous b/c if the fiesta (or any other car) has problems, especially being a new car, i’d want to give bad marks to ford directly …..their engineers who built vehicle, designer , or the project leader who ok’d everything
service can be good, but if the product is lousy, how can the dealership get so much flack for it ?
Good. They can’t stand behind their shitty cars and shittier service, then let them find better jobs somewhere else. Maybe they should buck up to their mother company and complain about not having the tools in place to foster satisfied customers.
Threating to not serve me in the future because of a hypothetical bad survey response? Yeah, that’s immediately getting an actual bad survey response.
Similar thing happened when I bought my Ford – the sales guy said if I didn’t rate him all the highest scores, he’d get fired. (I never actually did the survey. Bad consumer, whatever, I don’t remember “filling out a survey” being in my purchase contract.)
I did take my car there for service a couple of times, but the last experience was so bad I’m never going back – and I was explicit about my reasons why on THAT survey.
Brought in my truck as the engine light had come on. Having purchased the extended 6-year 100k warranty, I reasonably assumed the vehicle repair would be covered. First they couldn’t find the warranty so I had to call the original dealership to get the number for the 3rd party warranty (which they conveniently lied about during the sale through a lie of ommission). Then, the warranty refused to cover the issue costing me $200 out of pocket. They then have the gall to tell me that rating the service anything less than perfect is failure to them. To be fair I don’t blame the dealer, but I’m not going to rate anything greater than poor for my overall service experience. How in the hell is my engine light turning on not under warranty?
I’ve had jobs where we have those ridiculous surveys. The worst was a call-center for The Bank Which Must Not Be Named (it gets enough press here, I’m sure everyone can tell who it is,) where the survey system couldn’t keep track of who people were dealing with and never bothered to tell the customer who they were rating. The last straw was an all-zeroes survey that got me put on warning, even after my immediate supervisor and I pointed out the customer’s comment, which described being jerked around by several people in two different departments for over two hours, hanging up, calling again, getting me (I was mentioned by name and with a pretty clear description,) and in 15 minutes I resolved problems with his online banking, his mortgage payment, his checking and even sent him complimentary check registers as an apology for my colleagues’ previous mistakes. Dude wrote something like 600 words praising me by name, demanding I be given a raise and making it quite clear that the all-zeroes were intended for the previous people he’d dealt with, but still, I had to be placed on warning.
Warnings for bad CEWS were such that one bad survey like the one I described, and another where it was very clearly a phone glitch like the customer’s phone dropping the call (I had an all-zeroes survey with ‘Associate was very nice, but my iPhone dropped the call, so can’t rate her,’ seriously,) would put you on one-false-move-and-you’re-fired alert. An impossible-to-please crotchety senior, a customer who would or could not understand that you CAN’T connect him to Brian Moynihan no matter how much you dearly wanted to or a complete ditz who demanded to know why Fraud Claims took back the refund of her stolen funds after she admitted to giving her boyfriend her debit card…any one of those, and I would’ve been fired. That, and I frequently got CEWS for a whole different department than I worked in, like, ‘that department is ninety miles north and in a different state,’ different, due to the buggy telephony the outsourcing company used and my very common name. Even when it was dead clear that I couldn’t possibly have messed up anyone’s mortgage from my little chair in Checking, Savings and Online Banking customer-service (our screens only show whether or not people HAVE mortgages,) I was penalized for misdirected CEWS.
The company had no concept of what survey incentives should be. More than once I had customers singing my praises for fixing some little problem or another (what I loved about the job,) and would ask if there was any way they could help me. If I connected them to CEU (next-level associates,) for a compliment, it’d be forgotten. If I asked them to keep an eye on their email for a survey about my work and please rate me as well as they felt I deserved, I could be fired. We were NEVER allowed to let the customers know that the survey affected the employment of a real person, especially one they now liked, because the bank was having a big PR problem as it was with the new accounts that charged people to speak to a teller in person. A lot of people saw the bank as anti-employee, which, to be fair, it completely was, but actually saying so…THAT was the crime.
They also penalized us if our ‘Average Call Time’ calls went over five minutes. We handled Online Banking help calls. Try to picture what talking a senior citizen through updating their Flash player or installing a compatible browser might be like, multiply that by at least five hopeless, darling grannies a day -and they expected the calls to ‘work out’ to five minutes or we’d be placed on warning. This, when the (true,) rumors that people were going to be charged for debit cards, debit card replacements and paper images of checks (my God, so many old people lost their minds over that one,) were making every other call a ten-minute cuss-out?
It was the old customer-service problem, “it can be good, fast, or cheap; pick two,” made spiky. We HAD to be friendly and listen to every-effing-thing the customer said, with no option to hang up, even when some guys confused us with the phone-sex line or when customers did everything BUT threaten our lives. We had to solve the problem or, if impossible, persuade them to accept some substitute or consolation. We had to make sure the call wasn’t fraudulent and authenticate everyone who called in. We had the suicide hotline for the callers who were at the end of their rope and had to keep them on the line while it connected. We had the elder-abuse form if it looked like the kids were bilking Granny or if we saw Granny trying to online-transfer half her account to Nigeria. We had the bomb-threat form in our cubicles and that sucker saw use. We also had online-banking and campus-based eBanking customers whose helpless simply-didn’t-know made them both the politest and the most pathetic people. We had angry jagoffs with a good reason and angry jagoffs who had confused us with Glinda, the Good Witch of Free Money. We had mothers calling to get their dead children’s accounts closed and if we could type fast enough, we could send out a sympathy card. We had name changes for getting married, UTMA accounts for newborn babies, address changes for first homes and indeed, we could send cards for those, IF we typed fast enough. We even, God help us, had people whose mortgages were not with our bank at all or whose mortgages were paid off but who had foreclosure-liquidation guys on the doorstep saying they were from The Bank and ours was the first number they could find.
And we had FIVE MINUTES in which to handle this. Pay was $9.75/hr starting and we had none of the benefits of real Bank Who Must Not Be Named associates, because the outsourcing company was officially our employer on paper, though the outsourcers did give us a suicide hotline too. Twenty-minute wait.
That said, opening with “I have a problem, I’ll try to keep this under five minutes so they can’t ding you on talk-time and I’d be delighted to give you full marks on the survey if you can help me, because I know they’re vicious on that,” is still the secret passphrase for instantly-VIP service at The Bank Which Must Not Be Named, as the surveys are SUCH serious business.
And y’all picked EA. I don’t get it.
Former employees celebrate their quitting day annually. I ordered three sheet cakes for the homeless shelter and asked that ‘The Last Mall’ by Steely Dan be played in honor of the auspicious occasion. “Ah,” said the manager, “you quit The Bank, I see. Congratulations!”
There is actually a local Taco bell that has a sign on the counter stating that any survey responses lower then a 8 are the same as a zero. Just makes me want to put all zeros.
lemon law much?
I think these surveys need to be replaced by real feedback from the customer. I work in a call center (as well as my partner in another company), and both use those surveys to continue your employment even if the situation is beyond your control. My partner had one survey that he did everything 100% for the customer and they left between 7s and 9s with overall score an 8, and leaving a message saying “I never will give the highest score for anyone even though he fixed my issue completely”. I had gotten one that I found out i got 7s and 8s, but was treated as I failed it and got coaching. Got another that I had gotten 2s and 3s for everything except friendlyness and being polite (8 and 9), but it was due to a rule that was by the company why it could not be resolved, I tried fighting back about it, but company said I should have done it anyway. So basically I could get in trouble for not giving the customer what they want, but could also get in trouble for giving them what they want? Wow, lost both ways. These things are not meant to help anyone!