It doesn’t matter which motorcycle brand you chose to pledge your loyalty to, 7 out of 10 times you will be disappointed with their service. Your engine will keep making that sound with which you’ve had problems in the past, your chain will still feel tight and your electrical will still not function properly. It doesn’t matter how good the brand is, they often lack in service or customer service in general. Let’s figure this problem out and understand what goes beyond the walls of a dealership.There are two sides of the coin when it comes to inferior service done by service consultants. First is what they are actually taught in their training. Companies usually hire third-party trainers to train their employees the Standard operational Procedure (SOP) and necessary soft skills. This training involves all the important points, from getting to know the actual problem of your customer, to making him understand the issue behind it. If this was actually applied on the ground level then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Which brings us to the second side of the coin, the actual reality. In real-world scenarios, these “SOP’s” are most of the time avoided and whosoever is actually following them is forced to just focus on bringing in the numbers and not satisfied customers.
Now we know that the problem is the lack of ground-level implementation of an SOP. So, let’s figure out what are the reasons which cause such a strict procedure to get diluted when it reaches to a dealership.
The main reason for such an unfortunate event is incompetent authority figures. The company wants both, customer satisfaction as well as the sales number but the dealership only cares about the numbers. Caught in between both of them is service advisor/consultant, who can only regulate himself and a few mechanics. Since the main profit of any dealership comes from the service center, the Manager and the owner force the service consultants to bring in the numbers, which in this case means servicing as many motorcycles as he can without taking in the record the actual customer satisfaction. If he fails to do so then he can kiss his job goodbye.
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Coupled with this stress he’s under with low salary and almost nil holidays and you’ve got yourself a pathetic service center. It isn’t even the worst part because if a mystery audit gets conducted at the dealership he works at, then he will be blamed for not following the SOP, which apparently his seniors told him to. It will result in him again losing his job. Just like in every industry it’s always the small guy who is affected the most in every bad situation. The company will never rope in the dealer or the manager into the mess because it doesn’t want to stress its relation with “Money”.
A very important point to keep in mind is that you can never get cheated by the small guy, It is always a rich man who wants more and more. They put their executives on the front lines without any tools and expect them to perform not in the “Right way” but the “way” which they feel is right. It's a pretty sad situation because ultimately the customer and his motorcycle are affected which eventually forces him to befriend a local mechanic for his future endeavors.
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What can be done about it you ask? The best that you can do is drop an E-mail and let auto news websites know about it either on their site or Facebook. It won’t guarantee you the result that you seek but eventually unfit authority figures will get affected. If the customer satisfaction is a top priority for the company then it can easily regulate it by hiring the service consultants by itself. Thus giving them proper jobs and its customers the much needed proper service.
How has your service experience been so far? Let us know in the comments below. For everything related to motorcycles, stay tuned to BikesMedia.
By: Yetnesh Dubey