Believe Your Customers: The Pontiac Parable [E054] - Speak Up!

Thank You To Our Partners The Institute, AutoFlow, Shop Dog Marketing, In-Bound, Express

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In this episode - Craig has some fun with an old anecdote that intends to reminds us how important it is to take a customers complaint seriously - even when it sounds absolutely ridiculous!

The old story is about a man whose new Pontiac will not start ONLY if he goes and picks up vanilla ice cream… but if he buys other flavors, like strawberry or chocolate.

While this story may not be the best case study for a no start diagnostic process - it DOES provide a great moral lesson for taking clients seriously so you can get to the real details and the facts that matter.

Grab some vanilla ice cream and enjoy Craig’s take on this story and please consider sharing your own radical stories from the shop to [e-mail].

Communication gaps are almost always prevalent when those strange cases come up - and we’re sure you have a good example that could be worth sharing!

The WOTD:

Anecdote: A short amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person.

• An account regarded as unreliable or hearsay

In our episode today…

We’re talking about Customer complaints.  Specifically the off the walls ones.

More specifically - listening to them - as though what they are saying is accurate and true - even though things don’t even remotely plausible.

You don’t need to be in auto-repair to appreciate this topic - but our loyal listeners who ARE in auto repair - you definitely will. 

For me - there was a common gripe I’d hear from our techs at the transmission shop.  “I can’t get it to act up!”  Which is a horrible thing to have to call the customer to tell them.

They know there is a problem.

We can’t see it.

And in many cases - this is where things end.

The real problem, you guessed it, is a communication problem. 

Sometimes the details provided for our specialists are just not very clear - and what we do get from clients make it impossible to replicate an issue so we can diagnose a problem.  It’s why, in auto repair, intermittent problems are an absolute pain and can be massively time-consuming to solve. 

But this came across my desk from one of my colleagues in Autoflow.  

It’s something of an anecdote -

Anecdote

noun

• a short amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person.
• "told anecdotes about his job"

Never underestimate a customer’s complaint, no matter how funny it might seem! This is a real story that happened between the customer of General Motors and its Customer-Care Executive. 

A complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors:

This is the second time I have written to you, and I don't blame you for not answering me, because I sounded crazy, but it is a fact that we have a tradition in our family of Ice-Cream for dessert after dinner each night, but the kind of ice cream varies so, every night, after we've eaten, the whole family votes on which kind of ice cream we should have and I drive down to the store to get it. It's also a fact that I recently...