The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Talk to a person? Ugh.
Wednesday - August 16, 2006 02:55 PM in
My family's trusty minivan is due for a checkup, and while I was searching (online) for the dealer's phone number, I discovered that they had a handy web page for scheduling service appointments.
"How convenient," I thought. "I can just take care of it now."
But it turned out that the handy web page didn't actually schedule an appointment, it merely passed a message to the service department "requesting" an appointment. They are then supposed to get back to us to confirm.
Which they didn't.
I complained about this rude lack of follow-up to my wife, and she had a simple solution: "Why don't you just call them? That's what you were going to do anyway, wasn't it?"
Well, yes, but what I really wanted to do was get the van in with minimum of hassle. In my book, talking to a car dealer employee counts as "hassle."
So even though I had originally been planning to call and talk to a person, now that I've been given a self-service option and that option has been taken away, having to pick up the phone seems like a horrible inconvenience.
Posted by Peter Leppik
But it turned out that the handy web page didn't actually schedule an appointment, it merely passed a message to the service department "requesting" an appointment. They are then supposed to get back to us to confirm.
Which they didn't.
I complained about this rude lack of follow-up to my wife, and she had a simple solution: "Why don't you just call them? That's what you were going to do anyway, wasn't it?"
Well, yes, but what I really wanted to do was get the van in with minimum of hassle. In my book, talking to a car dealer employee counts as "hassle."
So even though I had originally been planning to call and talk to a person, now that I've been given a self-service option and that option has been taken away, having to pick up the phone seems like a horrible inconvenience.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 02:55 PM by | | | |