My car went in for a service and MOT last Friday. It's a lease car so the garage selection and booking was done by the lease company, all I had to do was make sure the car was in the car park at work in the morning and it would be collected, work done and returned to me in the afternoon.
In the morning I called the garage to confirm the car was there and also to tell them that I had spotted that the rear wiper had started to split so please could they replace it.
Car was collected as planned and returned to the car park. On the front passenger seat was a survey form for me to complete and send off - no other communication from the garage. The car had been washed so looked good but two things concerned me. Firstly the feedback form had a box on it for them to tick if they had done an MOT and it was blank. Secondly the rear wiper hadn't been replaced.
I phoned the garage and they said that the MOT had been done but by a separate mechanic who wasn't the one who filled in the form on the seat. As regards the wiper blade they queried whether this was something I had asked them to look at. I confirmed I had, he did some checking and came back on the line to say that they "hadn't been able to get one the right length". Suggested I should pop into a Halfords and get one .... which does beg the question why they couldn't get one...
That evening I checked the details in the service book and inspecting the condition of the wiper blades should be part of the service.
I now start to wonder what the quality/thoroughness of the rest of the service was like... if the thing I can see hasn't been addressed how confident can I be that things like brake pads/disks have been checked properly?
Odds are that everything else is fine but my confidence is shaken. Full marks at this point to Leaseplan - having spoken to them they have booked car into a main dealer for them to do a check over for me and replace faulty wiper.
Things would have been so different if the garage had left a note in the car saying - we noticed that the blade is damaged but couldn't replace today, we have ordered one and would it be OK for us to pop over on Monday to fit it while it's parked in the car park?
Then I would have had an entirely different impression.
Communication is critical and so is making sure that the easily visible things are done well - they may not be the most important part but they set the tone for everything else. I am reminded of the beautifully tied knots on a bandage round my head when I'd undergone surgery on my ear and the confidence that this inspired that the work inside my ear was good as well. Irrational maybe but somehow reasuring :-)
Perception really is reality in situations like this. It's interesting that this very post proves the fact that getting it wrong will generally stick in your mind, and get communicated (negatively) far more widely than if they had just done a good job in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lesson here about managing expectations and customer satisfaction, and the effects of not doing so on our business.