27 January 2014

To customers, a retailer must work as one. If the gaps start to show between the efforts of one department and another to deliver good service, then there’s a problem.

Let me explain precisely what I’m getting at, drawing on my own experiences when a couple of weeks ago, I bought a car for my daughter. We saw the 60-reg city car at a local main dealership, drove it, liked it, and agreed to buy.

I arranged to collect it three days later. By then, the retailer had to put it through a MoT test, address any problems that revealed, buy road tax and clean it. All perfectly do-able.

However, then I turned up at the appointed hour, the vehicle wasn’t ready. It had no MoT test or, of course, road tax. The salesman was full of apology. Sensing that I wasn’t best pleased, he quickly offered me a loan car to return home in.

Three hours later and they’d readied my car. Meanwhile, the sales manager rang me to apologise, explaining that the salesman had chased the service dept all that day to complete the job.

On collection, the car was spotless and the salesman handled its papers and delivery professionally. The manager popped out of his office to repeat his apologies, again blaming the service dept for the delay.

No harm done, we parted on friendly terms. The car? It broke down five days later with a flat battery. But that’s a story for another day…

The problems at this dealership, and the hows and whys of mending them, will be apparent to anyone with an ounce of ‘nous’.

It’s a classic case, though, of departments not working together as they should. That’s bad enough, but the sales chief made a poor situation worse by blaming the service dept. As a customer, I didn’t need to know this, nor did I care.

Instead, a simple phone call the afternoon before, explaining that a delay was probable and offering a car loan would have cut the kerfuffle factor in moments.

With a more co-operative relationship between departments, this would have been made easy – and the cracks in customer service needn’t have shown.

Ray Castle

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Tags: Auto Retail Network blog, customer service, opnion, sales department, service department, used cars