In my last post, I wrote about $1,500 saved. This post I’ll walk through some of the major ways the dealership messed up from a service point of view.

Issue: Inconsistent information. Why was I asked to pay $1,500 when a week earlier I was told it would be covered under warranty.

Lesson: Deal with the bad news first. As I’ve written about in my book (page 24, in the section titled Psychology and Customer Service), a number of studies have shown that human beings want to see improvement. Tell me the bad news then show what you can do to improve the situation. Don’t parrot ‘rules’ that don’t make sense.

Issue: Why did they duck my calls? It is not as if I called multiple people simultaneously - I asked the same question three different times to three different people - calling the next person only after waiting a few days for a response from the previous person. I didn’t get a even a call back from two of the three people. 

Lesson: One of the dead giveaway of a of rookie manager  is an unwillingness to deal with unpleasant situations.

Issue: It took a call from their competitor for the dealership realize that they had completely dropped the ball.

Lesson they (hopefully) learned: If it takes a competitor’s call to you to remind you to do your job, you aren’t doing your job.

Issue: They finally fixed my problem but didn’t even attempt to recover from the service mistakes.

Lesson: They had me back in, and repaired the part under warranty. All done professionally. However, they never explained to me what happened and didn’t apologize. They did not recover from the service snafu in any way. End result is still the same - no future business to this particular car dealer.

As I mentioned earlier, I will be speaking at the MIT Enterprise Forum at MIT tomorrow.

I’ve got a few thoughts jotted down, mostly on the key issues I see (and have personally seen before I defected to consulting) startups face when they finally get to thinking about support. Usually it is let’s build it and sell it (sometimes in reverse order!) and if support does come into play, it usually involves engineers doing support until too much of their time is ‘wasted’ with break-fix.

It was a pleasure building out a global support model at Akamai providing complex, award-winning support when we had over 15,000 servers to support and almost a million hits a second on the network. The whole philosophy was to build a support model to scale in an environment where a support call for break-fix was too late. By the time we figured out where the needle (your IP address) was in the haystack (among the million that *second*), it was too late. That was just to start the troubleshooting process…

Some of the philosophies are documented in my book, and more of it will be in the form of war stories we will talk about in my upcoming workshop, ‘Be the Voice of the Customer‘ on June 5th just outside Boston.

I’ve been asked if I would make any changes to the book I wrote. Of course, as any author will tell you, there are probably a number of things I would have done slightly differently. Nothing dramatic, but having created a workshop based on it has made me realize some of the things that resonate better.

Let me know if you have anything that you think should be revised or revisited.