Shocking Service with a Smile

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man” – George Bernard Shaw.

 

Just last night my sister was telling me about South Africans that lived in Hong Kong for a few years and recently returned to South Africa.  They have been shocked by the deterioration of service levels in their home country in the time they have been abroad.  There are countless cases of South Africans complaining about service levels.  We talk about it a lot when we gather together – banks, cellular service providers, the post office, government offices and car dealerships are favourites amongst those who get complained about.  One guy even created a web-based business on our moans and groans… Others resort to mass protests and sometimes violence to voice their frustration.

The above quote often goes through my head when I feel my blood pressure reaching the ceiling due to the general apathy of service givers in this country.  I have no qualms with being labelled unreasonable in order to get things done.  That does not mean that I do not wonder about why the person on the other side – staring at me blankly, shaking their head in disbelief at my unhappiness or whispering something to their colleague in a language they think I do not comprehend – just does not get or care about me.  I am their paying customer after all…

Perhaps the cultural differences between myself and this person are just too big.

Perhaps the system of reward for this person discourages them from doing a good job.

Perhaps the system does not support them in providing good service and the problem can be blamed on someone else upstream in the service chain…

Sometimes I fear that my unreasonableness is shortening my own lifespan and I force myself to just accept it.  Fight the fights that matter.  Go all Art of War on it…

My partner’s little cheap and cheerful city runabout named Pixie, a Kia Picanto, went in for her second scheduled service about ten days ago.  Pixie is two years old and have about 17,000km on the clock.  As part of this service, we asked that her passenger-side rear-view mirror’s control be looked at.  We showed the service advisor how the mechanism has become very stiff and it was now impossible to adjust the mirror with any degree of accuracy…

When we went to pick up Pixie from her service, the same service advisor told us there was nothing wrong with the mirror.

Blood pressure rising.

I suggested that he shows me how to operate the mirror.  On our way to the car, he pointed out that these mirror mechanisms never break on these cars.  “So what?” I asked.  “Does that mean that this one is not broken?”

Uncomfortable silence.

So he attempted to adjust the mirror, only to then realize (admit?) that the mirror mechanism was indeed broken.  He called one of the workshop personnel to have a look too.  Same realization dawned.

As these things never break, they did not have the part available.  They will phone us when it was there.  Sun Tzu landed on my left shoulder and suggested that we just forget about the incident and the problem.  How often does one adjust one’s passenger-side rear-view mirror anyway?

To say that my experience with after sales service at car dealerships is jaded, is an understatement.  Three years ago, it took seven weeks and six visits to a dealership before the ABS braking, traction & stability control as well as cruise control (some rather important safety features, it could be argued) on my Mercedes SLK (still under warranty and maintenance program) functioned again.  The correct part was only ordered after about four weeks and three visits – that is, after I had contacted someone in a senior position at Mercedes-Benz South Africa I had previous dealings with.  Said part was then thought not to solve the problem and resulted in the follow-up visits.  After it was finally fixed, the service advisor admitted to me that the the new part was fitted the wrong way around on the first few tries…

That service experience was instrumental in my decision to swap brand to Audi.  It took four dealership visits over a period of a year for my brand new Audi’s one seat to stop visibly vibrating and audibly rattling.  This sounds pretty petty (unreasonable again?) until you realize that I stay in the financial capital of South Africa, where roads have so many potholes and irregularities due to fixed-up potholes that such nagging noises cannot be nullified by turning up the radio…

Along the way, the problems’ existence were denied and also blamed on the alleged after-market leather fitted to the car.  I had the car custom-built the way it is.  The leather was part and parcel of the nearly R70k’s worth of factory-fitted options I specified to the car.  Needless to way, the insinuation that I had after-market leather took my rpm way beyond the red line…

The pattern I have noticed, with myself and others, is that we can accept that mirror mechanisms and such things fail or break.  It is the banter and false promises from the service advisors that irk  us – the thought that the mechanism never breaks, the admission that the part was fitted the wrong way around, the insinuations that one mistreated the product…

After all this, you will share my shock and surprise when Kia Sandton contacted us yesterday to say that a new mirror mechanism has arrived for Pixie.  We could pop in for thirty minutes whenever we wanted and they would have her fixed up.  We did so around lunchtime yesterday.  I followed in the former rattlebox to the dealership to take my partner to lunch while we waited, thinking that thirty minutes would be closer to three hours.  It turned out to be forty minutes. 

Wow, I am impressed.  I guess that Mercedes-Benz and Audi, with products costing four times as much as Pixie each, have lowered my expectations to such an extent that when someone does what they promise, I am surprised.  No, shocked.