Miasmatic Review

Contagion VS Dealership Part 2

After yesterday’s fiasco with the dealership, I brought Janine back to them to fix the door. My wife decided to come with to help keep me in check. She has seen me blow up in the past and thought maybe I might need the extra voice of reason today. My wife is smart.

As we pull in Ktreva spots the salesman that sold us Janine and her van. He comes over to say hello and to see how things are going. The first words out of my mouth are, “Andrew, I’m having issue with your service department, AGAIN.” He asks me to wait and he runs to get the Operations Director, Tim. Tim introduces himself and asks how I can help him.

Tim learned a valuable lesson today. Do start a conversation with an open-ended question to a customer you have been warned that is extremely unhappy. You could see the flood of information wash over him. He was swept away in the torrent of displeasure. After I finished my 10-minute dissertation that ended with the statement, “I love your sales department, Andrew is the best. But I will never buy another vehicle from this dealership because of the service department. I’ve contacted General Motors to find the next closest dealership that does warranty work, after my truck is correctly finished I will NOT step foot into this dealership again. I’m also making sure that everyone I meet knows about the problems I’ve had.”

My voice never reached the level of yelling. It didn’t need to. Being a re-enactor, I’ve learned to speak from my diaphragm so that my voice projects clearly. Everyone in that service area knew exactly what had happened and how displeased I was. Other customers were looking at my out of the corner of their eyes. Tim says to me, “Let me look into everything and give us a second chance to make everything right.” Much to his shock my response was, “This was your second chance.”

He walked over to Janine to check out the door. When he walked over to the door, he immediately noticed that it wasn’t sitting properly when closed. It wasn’t lining up with the rear door/front quarter panel. Plus when he opened it, it creaked again! He called over the Service Advisor, Joe, to look at it and he pointed out the problem. This actually gives me some hope that they will fix it correctly this time. I’m not going to hold my breath though.

When I called yesterday, I was told they would have a rental car waiting for me when I arrived. Since I went on my lunch break, and my wife was with me, we had a limited time to get in and out. Well to make matters worse for Tim, the enterprise rental people had left and there was no car waiting for me. They called and paged the guy for 30 minutes and he still hadn’t shown up. My wife was late back from lunch, so she called her supervisor to warn her. I’m salary so if I take a longer lunch, that’s okay. Finally, they asked if they could just drive us to work and have Enterprise drop off a vehicle. Since Ktreva was late, I said yes.

After getting to work, I have a call from the Enterprise rent-a-car agent. They are going to pick me up after work and get me the vehicle. All I know is that I’m getting a GM product. It had better not be a Chevy Aveo.