One of our cars has been in the shop for seven days now, awaiting the completion of some minor* service. I just learned that it won’t be ready until tomorrow, despite being assured on Monday that it would be ready yesterday.<\/p>\n
To add insult to injury (“injury” being defined as the inconvenience of having to reschedule meetings to work around the limitation of one vehicle for two busy adults), the shop has yet to call me, unbidden, to report the status. I’ve had to call them every day to find out what’s going on, and not once has the other party apologized for the lack of progress or failure to keep its promises.<\/p>\n
This is unacceptable treatment, especially coming as it does from one of the largest dealerships in the city, one that claims to pride itself on treating the customer properly. Normally, I wouldn’t have any recourse, but given that we’ve started shopping for a new vehicle, the cost to this dealership of its poor service will be tangible: we’ve bought our last four cars there, but the next one (and any thereafter) will be purchased elsewhere.<\/p>\n
The lesson for all of us who provide services to the public is simple: never underestimate the importance of communicating with your customers and clients. And don’t believe for a moment that there are details too small to matter.<\/p>\n
*By “minor” I mean something that any qualified, competent mechanic could do in a few hours. That obviously excludes me, which is why the car is in the shop, and not in my garage.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Why isn’t this obvious? Neglect your customers; lose their business. That’s pretty simple, isn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-society-culture","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}