Complaints How we deal with them
Published: 01 June, 2021
This is our belief at CCM. While every attempt is made at customer satisfaction inevitably occasionally things go wrong which leads to customer complaints. We encourage customers to give feedback, especially negative to enable us to improve our services. If you are happy, tell others. If not, tell us.
Face to face complaints
These can sometimes be the worst. It puts you on the spot and it is human nature to become defensive. As hard as it is, do not react. What happens in that moment, your emotional brain engages and you react on emotion not on rational thoughts. Stay calm. In a face-to-face situation, body language is a giveaway. How you stand, where you put your arms, your facial expression all tells its own story. You must try and remain in a neutral stance, so that you do not come across as defensive.
You need to listen, but in the right way. The biggest mistake people make is that they listen to respond and do not listen to understand. Of course, you want to defend your team but this is not the moment to do it. Listen to what the customer is complaining about, be empathetic, show some understanding and acknowledge what their complaint is about. Ask them what their ideal resolution would be. Let them know that you have taken on board what has been said, that you will investigate their issue and you will get back to them with your findings.
Written complaints
Some people find it easier to complain in writing, not having the ability to feel comfortable complaining face to face. The absolute first, is to acknowledge the complaint immediately. Again, show empathy and understanding, explain that you will investigate and respond with your findings. Do not let people put you under pressure, explain that you need time to investigate properly as you do not wish to make a rash decision. Do not get off topic, it is so easy to come back with what you have done good and not actually deal with the issue. Stay focussed on the complaint.
Honesty
At CCM, one of our team values is honesty. If you find during your investigations into a complaint, that you have made a mistake or your conduct/service has not been what it should have been, be honest. Own up. Imagine how your customer feels when you own up and admit, “yes, sorry, our service was not up to scratch.” We recently had a complaint from a long-standing customer regarding our poor service and the fact that there was an error on her paperwork. Said customer went on to say how they continuously use us as our service was usually superb but was very disappointed this time.
Following my investigations, I discovered we did make a few errors with her paperwork. I responded with the following: “This is a process that we follow, to ensure that we order all the relevant parts that may be required as to not hold up the job. In this instance, it seems that we invoiced you without deleting said parts from your invoice, which was a mistake on our behalf. I am not making excuses for our team; we have been very busy doing out upmost to keep customers vehicles on the road. It is never our intention to mislead and we strive to carry out good workmanship and service. Please accept our sincere apologies for the upset that this has caused you.”
The email went on with the customer apologising for complaining and admitting that the whole COVID-19 situation had got to her and that she had overreacted. Would her response have been the same if we had got defensive, denied doing any wrong and just pushed the blame back at her?
Bad reviews
It is upsetting when someone tarnishes your reviews with a bad one, but I believe it makes them more credible. Can anyone really get five-star reviews all the time with no negative remarks at all? Anyone who looks at reviews, never just read the bad ones, you will read many. Having the odd bad one makes you human, shows you do and can make mistakes and sometimes your service does slip. How you respond is much more important that the bad review. Would one bad review stop someone using you? Absolutely not. The point is, how you react to someone, causes a reaction. What reaction do you want?
Sometimes people have genuine reasons to complain, be honest if that is the case, do what you can to rectify the situation. That is what people will remember. Firstly, that you acknowledge that you were wrong and secondly, that you did something about it. Sometimes people just need to let off steam. By being empathetic and understanding can be enough for them to rant and walk away. Sometimes people just need to complain because that is their nature. In this case, there is nothing you can do. Just do not invite or encourage them to come back.
One of the most common complaints is about costs. Do not take ownership of someone’s problem. When communicating with customers regarding their vehicle needs, do not use negative words, like “unfortunately, I’m sorry to say, sadly, I’m afraid.” It is not your fault that their vehicle is broken, failed or needs a service. So long that you have communicated to your customer throughout, any issue with costs should be avoided. Most of the time you find that you have done no wrong. It is often a misunderstanding, or someone’s expectations not being met. In all these scenarios, use them as examples to improve. Why were there misunderstandings, why was that person’s expectations not met, what can we do to make sure this does not happen again. Remember, do not be defensive, think about your body language, be empathetic and treat people how you would like to be treated. You will be pleasantly surprised.
What you can do
Have in place and on show a customer care charter detailing that you use OE quality parts, that all repairs and servicing meet or exceed the expected standards of this industry. Explain that staff are continually trained and provide the best possible standards of workmanship. This enables your staff and your customers to know that you are doing everything possible to deliver high quality work and service. Then add what the procedure is when a customer wants to make a complaint.
Have a vision and values. This is imperative as it becomes the guidelines for staff to use when dealing with any issues. Give your Front of House staff autonomy to deal with the little niggles that come in. Positive intent; believe that your staff will look after your best interests, allow them to issue a refund or offer a discount if that is what they believe is the best resolution. Some complaints are very minor and can be dealt with immediately. Make sure everyone is aware of the escalation route, time scale and who to escalate to. Any complaint must be acknowledged immediately, with the intent of following up/investigating in a reasonable amount of time. This must be communicated to the customer. Ask the customer what their ideal resolution is. If the customer finds the proposal unsatisfactory, then is the time to move to mediation or legal settlement. When a complaint has been resolved, follow this up again, depending on the size and nature of the complaint. Overall, effective communication is crucial. Lastly, and crucially, ensure that you act fairly and honestly.
- Dealing with customer complaints
Running any business, and perhaps more so a service business like an independent garage, you have to learn to recognise there are different types of customers with different expectations.
How we deal and adapt our services, the customer journey to meet and exceed these expectations are essential if we are going to succeed in having a healthy profitable business. This function must be adopted by everyone in your garage regardless of size.
Occasionally however, we are faced with challenging customers who complain, usually in a passive aggressive manner. These customers feel they have a reason to be upset. I always used to say to my team at Brunswick Garage, that there will always be a small percentage of customers that we will never be able to please, and importantly we must not let these handful of customers taint our view of all customers. When you find yourself having to deal with a disgruntled customer, remembering a few simple techniques can help to defuse the situation. Both parties being upset and defensive will not amount to anything positive.
Listen
In my experience running independent garages, I came to the realisation that in virtually every case of an unhappy customer, all that was needed to resolve the customer concern was to listen to the customer, or recognise actually they weren’t being listened to.
The customer isn’t always right, but it’s not always okay to tell them that, sometimes you have to act as if they are right. Active listening, eye contact, nodding your head in agreement, being on the same level with them, expressing empathy, and relating to how the customer is feeling can be incredibly helpful. Remember to place yourself in the customer’s position or frame of mind and never patronise a customer or look for excuses. We are working in an industry where many aspects of the customer journey have to come together from the initial phone call to returning the customers vehicle keys, so we have to accept that sometimes things go wrong however much we try to avoid mistakes.
Rapport
Once you have been able to establish some rapport, you may find a mutually agreeable resolution to the problem, and you must do whatever you can to achieve this outcome. Explain to the customer what you are going to do to help the situation. It could be engaging the customer in a test drive to better understand the complaint, admitting the garage made a mistake, or if possible, offering the customer a lift back home, work or a loan vehicle while you resolve their issue. You must assure at all times the customer feels that you are truly trying your best to resolve their concern and provide them with the least convenience as possible.
Research indicates that customers prefer the person they are speaking with to instantly solve their problem. However sometimes complaints have to be moved up the chain of command, but make sure they don’t add to the customer's frustration. So, wherever possible, resolve the issue yourself. This has the added advantage of demonstrating to those senior to you that you are willing to manage difficult situations yourself without resorting to escalation.
If you really can’t solve the customers concerns, take ownership of the issue and ensure that the complaint is effectively escalated and that you follow up to see what the outcome is.
It’s also worth mentioning that if you say you are going to do something, you should always do it. Don’t be tempted to tell customers that someone will get in touch with them in an hour when they might not get a call for a few hours. The customer won’t thank you for it in the long run. Always be sure you can meet the promise you make.
Perspective
Many of us have worked in the automotive sector for so long we forget what it is like to bring our vehicle for repair. Knowing what your competition is doing can also pay dividends in other ways too. It can help you set yourself apart by creating a business experience, an atmosphere that is different from any other garage locally and far beyond.
Keeping perspective when it comes to the customer experience will help you to create a positive customer experience and maintain a solid customer base. At Brunswick Garage we were of course never happy to receive complaints, however we used it as a prompt to better our service and if a customer made the effort to write or email us with a concern, we displayed their comments in reception with the thank you letters. We wanted to show our customers that we were not perfect, but also show them we took complaints very seriously and we always aimed at achieving a positive outcome. Learning to handle challenging customers will build respect for your business and ultimately result in higher customer retention and profits.
Positive/negative
When we receive complaints, we often look upon them in a negative way. However, complaints can be really useful to any garage and although it doesn’t feel like it at the time, the complaint is extremely positive in that it helps highlight problems with our service and procedures.
The alternative to receiving customer complaints is not receiving them and carrying on just the way we are, oblivious the negative impact our actions are having on customers who perhaps won’t return or will be complaining to their friends rather than to us. This is extremely damaging as we never get the chance to put right the errors that we don’t hear about. It’s a bit of a cliché, but complaints really are a gift.
- All the things YOU could do…
If you had a little money, how would you spend it to improve your business? Maybe you’d buy the latest ADAS calibration kit, or subscribe to an workshop management system?
Okay, now let’s think bigger. If you were given all the money you had ever invested in your business and could start it again from scratch, how would you gear it up to attract customers and make it profitable? Would you build something like
your current business, or would it be totally different?
Why do I ask? Because the world changes quickly, which means our businesses are rarely set up exactly as we need or want, and we must make frequent spending decisions. We must work out how to prioritise our spending, to ensure we always offer the things of greatest worth to our customers; i.e. we maximise our value proposition.
Last month, we sought to understand our typical customer (a private vehicle owner). We saw that they have functional, emotional and social tasks to complete (jobs). These jobs have either good results (gains), or bad outcomes, risks and obstacles, related to their undertaking or failure (pains). For example, taking a car to the workshop is an extreme pain for a typical customer because it makes it more difficult for them to complete their more important jobs (e.g. commute to work or navigate the school run).
This month, we’ll use the things we learned about our customers to design our value proposition; We’ll use a repeatable technique to ensure our businesses offer the things our customers need and want. The result will be a value (proposition) map, or value map for short.
Value mapping
Anything that helps our customers get their jobs done will have value. Therefore, our products and services must aim to help them complete their jobs. If these products and services then eliminate a customer’s pains, they are pain relievers, or, if they produce gains, they become gain creators. By stating the ways in which our products and services create gains and relieve pains, we can communicate their potential benefit to our customers. Hence, by putting a list of our products and services together with the lists of their respective pain relievers and gain creators, we create a guide to the worth of our business to our customers. That is, we make a value map.
Of course, not all our products and services, and their subsequent pain relievers and gain creators, are equally relevant to our customers; some are essential, whilst others are merely nice to have. We can use these differences to help our decision making: by ranking the items in our value map in their order of relevance to our customer, we can see which can be ignored, and which can be prioritised.
Figure 1 shows example items that might be within an independent workshop’s value map, ranked in order of relevance to a private-vehicle-owning customer (a value map is targeted at a specific customer segment). As with the creation of a customer profile, there is no ‘right’ answer; this one is based on my half-thought-through assumptions, and previous business experiences. Yours might differ. Hence, we must derive and tweak our respective value maps accordingly. Ultimately, each of us would use business metrics (e.g. profit ratios and customer satisfaction ratings) to tune our value propositions to the max. But that’s a task for another time.
Products and services
We saw before that customers don’t like to waste time at a workshop; they want to go through their lives with the minimum of hassle. They crave convenience. Therefore, courtesy cars, a handy location (covered under ‘community-orientated’ services in Figure 1), extended opening-hours, while-you-wait servicing, or pick-up and returns (either vehicle or customer) all represent high value offerings. We don’t have to offer them all - they’re included in Figure 1 for reference. Likewise, online bookings and related management systems simplify engagement, bring convenience, and enhance value.
Have you ever heard a customer say they like messy and dirty workshops and technicians? I haven’t. That’s because we attach value to our health and safety: If your premises and staff are well presented, they will project professionalism, and your customers will reach their desired emotional state of feeling safe. Even better, properly motivated, well-equipped and trained staff will increase the likelihood that your customers are safe and secure. As safety fears are powerful motivators and manipulators, we must use our expertise to help our customers assess and manage their exposure to risks. They will then be in control and feel in control of their safety.
Not all customers will be seeking to cut costs all the time, but certainly all of them will want to control their costs. There are ways a business can help customers manage this aspect of their lives: clear terms of trade and fee structures; well-managed engagements with expert advice; warranted parts and labour; and a range of payment methods such as easy-pay solutions, touch-less, or credit card services.
Surprisingly, some customers want to look after their vehicles. Primarily, this helps them feel safe and secure, minimises the risk of disruption to their lives (from breakdowns), and protects the value of their vehicles. A good service history represents monetary value in this sense. This means we should be offering, high quality parts and labour, and OE-aligned servicing and repairs.
Pain relievers
It might suit your ego to think all your customers visit your workshop because of your skill, expertise and professionalism, or your friendly welcome and great (i.e. free) coffee. However, pure convenience can be the decisive factor when some customers choose where to take their vehicles: you’re around the corner; you had a spare courtesy car; you’re open; you were prepared to look at it there and then; you had the part in stock etc. Whilst this reflects the significant value these pain relievers offer to all our customers, it is the case that some of those who value convenience above all else are not able to see the worth of your other products and services. If they don’t understand that your conveniences come at a cost, then point them elsewhere. You will never please them. Nothing has the potential to sour a relationship like an unexpected bill: When my head was buried in an absorbing diagnostic job, adequate communication was sometimes an issue for me. My ‘solution’ was to swallow the costs, to avoid upsetting the customer. This was neither a solution nor a sustainable business strategy. What I really needed was the best preventative medicine of all: Great communication.
It should be no surprise that there are far more pains than gains in our value map: Servicing and repair workshops are all about pain relief; we are either trying to eliminate a current pain, through diagnostics and repairs, or carrying out preventative maintenance to avoid a future pain. Because this is our reason for being, customers find it intolerable to think our actions have caused them unnecessary inconvenience or costs. Nowhere is this more obvious than when we try to ‘help them out’ - Every time we ever tried to help a customer to control costs (i.e cut costs), by fitting a cheaper part or trying a less expensive solution, it always backfired. Every single time. Can you guess who suffered the consequences? It always paid us better to ensure the car was fixed when it left the workshop. ‘Try it and see’ tends to translate into ‘you are going to be really cheesed off next time I see you’, It also counted that we supplied quality, parts and labour.
Gain creators
When properly delivered, our products and services will help our customers have the following: An easy-life; a car that holds its value and works properly; peace of mind; a sense of feeling special at our premises; and the information from our sound advice to make good decisions.
However, for some of us, the ultimate convenience is to not have to engage our brain, so if we really want to take our value proposition to the next level, we must be highly proactive and perform our customers’ thinking for them: e.g. by sending MOT and service reminders, with easy to process ‘calls to action’ so that they are only a click away from being sorted. Then, at the allocated time, we would pick-up their vehicles from their homes to take them to the workshop, leaving a replacement vehicle in their place. I know plenty of businesses that do this. And they are successful.
Money, money, money
There are many servicing and repair options available to private vehicles owners: Independent workshops, fast-fit chains, main-dealer workshops, mobile technicians, chancers, etc. Next time we’ll see how other business types deliberately tweak their offerings (value maps) to fit specific customer segments. We need to learn to be equally deliberate and well-informed about our investment decisions. What if we don’t? Well, we might waste all our money, and lose all our customers. Which isn’t always funny, even in a rich man’s world.
https://automotiveanalytics.net
- Lumileds football competition launches: It’s All About Quality
With a Summer of European International Football ahead of us, Lumileds - who are licensed to manufacture and market Philips Automotive Lighting products - are launching a football skills competition where the best entries will win Tournament Footballs.
- Virtual Customer Assistant
Virtual Customer Assistant, launched by UK-based Marketing Technology start-up NEA Media AI allows customers to engage with a workshop on a number of platforms, including WhatsApp, SMS, Facebook Messenger or web. Instead of phoning and being put on hold, customers can communicate via the AI-powered Virtual Customer Assistant to make bookings and raise concerns, helping the business convert more incoming leads. The Virtual Customer Assistant also allows garage networks to centralise their customer service function, including messaging and core process.
- Smart choice
In 2016, three battery businesses within the ECOBAT group were brought together as ECOBAT Battery Technologies (ECOBAT), to serve the entire European aftermarket. As an established business with a rich heritage and superb reputation that has been trading in the UK for close to 70 years – initially as Manchester Batteries and then Manbat – ECOBAT’s ethos is to supply its customers with the high quality batteries they require, when they need them, as well as provide a level of customer service that is only possible with the experience that comes with a longstanding, knowledgeable sales team, with core battery expertise, willing to go the extra mile.
ECOBAT’s dedicated support for its customers also filters down to the workshop, where, as automotive battery technology evolves, it wants technicians to be fully aware of both the type of batteries and the associated systems that are present in the modern vehicle.
Despite the huge growth in sales of pure and hybrid electric vehicles seen recently, the fact remains that the vast majority of the vehicle parc still relies on a lead-acid battery. However, within this number, it is those vehicles equipped with micro-hybrid or Stop/Start technology that represent the fastest growing segment, and these are designed to use either an absorbed glass mat (AGM) or enhanced flooded battery (EFB). So, for the typical workshop, it is these batteries and the technology associated with them, that is now the most relevant.
To allow them to understand these developments and grasp the opportunity this evolution provides, ECOBAT has introduced two initiatives that have changed the landscape at installer level, which is where the repercussions of the technology have the greatest impact, because of the interaction they have with the consumer.
Due to the fact that battery replacement in a Stop/Start-equipped vehicle follows a different process to that of a traditional system, the first step was to provide technicians with all the necessary tools to enable them to accurately check the condition of the battery and replace them correctly. This was accomplished with the introduction of ECOBAT ONE BOX, a four-in-one kit containing a battery analyser to accurately assess the condition of the existing battery, a Smart charger and OBD lead to support the vehicle’s ECU/data storage during the replacement process and a battery validation tool to ensure the new AGM/EFB battery is correctly assimilated into the vehicle’s battery management system (BMS).
The second was an online training and assessment module to instruct them to use the tools within the ONE BOX package to their full effect and allow them to replace Stop/Start batteries with complete confidence. In addition, having certified technicians of this calibre on the premises also elevates the status of the workshop in the eyes of the motorist, with the knock-on benefits that naturally brings.
These significant steps would obviously come to nothing without access to the high quality batteries that are needed to successfully complete Stop/Start replacement. However, this isn’t an issue for ECOBAT, as it is able to back up its support offering with the brands – Exide, VARTA, Lucas and Numax – that provide workshops with a range of solutions that can cater for every conceivable application, and allows them to service and repair their customers’ vehicles to original equipment standards, with the reliability and peace of mind that assures. For further details,visit: www.uk.ecobat.tech
