After driving my car a decade, I decided to go big or go home. Influenced by my Grandfather’s love of his Cadillac and remembering the weekend rides where he took us out… I bought my first Cadillac earlier in the year. The dealership I purchased from is fantastic… down-to-earth folks from the receptionist to the salesperson to the service people.
Every time I make an appointment for an oil change (off my iPhone App… how cool is that?!), I have a great experience.
And then it happens.
This.
I’m asked, chided, and almost begged to fill out any surveys from General Motors with Completely Satisfied marks. It’s made clear that I can’t enter a single grade without doing so, and there are terrible repercussions for the staff if that doesn’t happen.
It makes me think that GM has taken what used to be a great tool to gauge their client feedback and track their satisfaction, turning it into a weapon that their dealers and employees are petrified of. It is unfortunate that the dealership goes through the trouble of printing and stapling this cover letter to every service statement and spending a few times explaining it. I’m not mentioning the dealership in this blog post since I don’t want them to get in trouble.
Any company that captures customer intelligence understands that there’s both a margin of error with customer feedback and that human error is imminent in customer service. In other words, no matter how well your team performs, some people are just having a bad day or are jerks and won’t give you a perfect score. At other times, your service team may make a mistake… but how they recover from it matters, not whether or not they did a perfect job. In other words, throw out the top and bottom 5% and keep the rest for an accurate performance measurement.
Consumers don’t believe any company provides a perfect 5-star experience, so stop demanding it.
I’m confident that the motivation for gathering this customer satisfaction data is for all the good reasons. But the execution appears to be the issue. Companies shouldn’t be afraid of making a mistake occasionally or being on the bad end of the wrath of a cranky consumer.
The irony, of course, is that outside of this survey, I’m delighted with my dealer.
