Unfortunately, this world is full of examples of lackluster customer service.  I have a little bit of patience for low wage workers, usually teenagers, who slack off on the service end of the job.  But I have minimal patience for corporations which totally disregard the service end of their business.

Not too long ago a good friend of mine, Scott, encountered a perfect example at Nissan of the type of thinking that destroys customer service.  He took his beloved Nissan 350Z to the dealership to get some work done and caught a ride on the “courtesy van” to work.

Sounds good right?  There was a day, not so long ago, where it was totally up to the customer to find a way home when they dropped their automobile off for maintenance.  Today, most dealerships provide some sort of limited drop-off service for their customers.

Scott’s ride to work starts off okay, until he notices that the driver is going way out of his way to drop off the first customer and passing the destinations of himself and other riders.  Low and behold, the first passenger dropped off is a Nissan employee at Nissan’s offices. The driver then returns to the normal delivery area and begins dropping off the other riders.

Scott, annoyed and curious, questions the driver about going so far out of the way to drop off that passenger before dropping off the other passengers in a more logical order.  The driver informs him that it is Nissan’s policy to take Nissan employees to work first since “they have to be there by 8 AM.”

I applaud Scott for not choking somebody then as he is finally dropped off at his office a good deal after 8 AM.

He had some good questions but he knew the driver was not the one to blame.  Why is it more important for a Nissan employee to get to the office by 8 AM than for a Nissan customer to get to work by 8 AM?  Wouldn’t it be the other way around?  Wouldn’t the corporation have more tolerance for employees being late if it was done to ensure that their customers got to work on-time and happy?

It is this kind of corporate thinking that plagues so many businesses today.  They were so close to getting it right, but couldn’t get past their own internal politics to put a winning customer service model in action.

I can totally see how they came to that policy.  I imagine one day a Nissan employee was late to work and his/her boss got upset.  The employee explained that he/she dropped their car off for service and the Nissan courtesy van was late getting to the office due to the distance from the dealership to the offices.

This causes a chain of complaints and memo’s that eventually end up on the desk of somebody who wants the complaining to stop and who has enough power to get something done about it.  Down comes the directive to the local dealership that Nissan employees are to dropped off first.  For that manager, the problem is solved and the complaints are done.

Of course, that person is too far removed from the dealership’s service department to see the effect it has on the company’s most valuable asset: their customers.

As a result of this policy an owner of Nissan’s flagship vehicle, the Nissan 350Z, concludes that he will never buy another Nissan again.  Of course, this wasn’t the only episode that lead Scott to that decision but it was one that clearly defined Nissan’s misplaced customer service model.  Even worse for Nissan, this is a customer who loves cars and loves to talk about cars.  So now, he has retold this story to numerous friends and coworkers and every time one of these “Nissan experience” stories comes up he concludes it by explaining how he will never by from Nissan again.

I’ll leave you with one final counter-point to chew on.  This kind of experience has convinced my friend that the only way to get good service on a car is to buy from a higher-end dealer.  There will be no more Nissan’s, Toyota’s or Honda’s and certainly no American car dealers for Scott.  He has concluded that he must move up to Infiniti, Acura and Lexus dealerships to get the type of customer service he deserves.  The catch is that these dealerships are all owned by the same major auto makers.  Infiniti is just another arm of Nissan, Acura of Honda etc.  Has Scott just fallen for a clever plan to drive him towards more expensive vehicles?  Is Nissan’s poor customer service just part of a master plan to drive customers on the economic borderline to a class of cars they would not normally purchase?

Is Nissan really that clever and cheap to purposefully make bad customer service decisions at one brand level to drive buyers to a higher level knowing that those that can not afford the next class of car will just put up with the less-than-stellar treatment?

I don’t think I’m ready to give them that much credit, although I don’t doubt that some car makers would make decisions like that if given the choice.  I suspect that the lower-end auto brands simply don’t feel the need to put extra effort into thinking about customer service that much.  They are all about volume of sales and keeping costs down.  Only the high-end dealerships have the financial incentives to put a little extra time into customer service.