39/365 Tired

39/365 Tired (Photo credit: Mykl Roventine)

Tip for the day: No amount of positive public relations and marketing can make up for poor customer service or a poor product.

I feel like I’ve been stuck on the customer service theme lately. Perhaps it’s the season.

In Vermont, cars are required to undergo an annual inspection to make sure they perform within certain emission standards and are generally safe for road travel. Two weeks ago, our 2006 Subaru failed its inspection due to worn tires. We bought these tires less than two years ago. They had travelled only 20,000 miles of their 60,000-mile warranty. My husband thought we could get a partial credit from the tire place where we bought them to put toward the cost of a new set of tires. Turns out, it wasn’t that simple.

We had 72 hours to buy new tires and have the car re-inspected without having to pay for another inspection. The clock was ticking…

Meet or exceed customer expectations

Armed with all the necessary paperwork, including when we bought the tires and when we had them rotated, my husband made his first trip to the tire place. They told him we couldn’t get a credit. “Your wheels are out of alignment,” they said.

Strange. The place that had just inspected our car earlier that day hadn’t mentioned it. So he took the car back to the place where it was inspected. They didn’t believe it. They sent my husband to a neighboring place to have the alignment checked. Nothing out of alignment.

So with that paperwork in hand, my husband returned to the tire place. This time he was told, “We don’t trust their equipment….” They wanted my husband to go to a different place—their sister store—in a nearby town to have the alignment checked.

So the next day my husband went to that place to have the alignment checked. Here they told him the tires were out of alignment. Okay. Not too surprising. But this time, we didn’t trust their report.

So bright and early on Saturday, my husband went to a third place to have the alignment checked. This check showed that one wheel was .1% out of alignment. I don’t know much about tires, but this seems like a very small number. And now we had three alignment checks from three different vendors telling us three different things.

Work to make an unhappy customer a happy one

Now by this point, my husband was pretty certain we’d never do business with the original tire place again. They had lost his trust. They made it very difficult to do business with them. They were making him jump through many hoops to avoid giving us a few hundred dollar credit. Not a good formula for making and keeping customers.

My husband made one last ditch effort. He went a third time to the tire vendor and showed him the final alignment report. This time he was told to call the tire manufacturer and get a case number. It was out of their hands.

In all of this the onus was on my husband, the customer. I can’t tell you how many hours he spent trying to track down a few hundred dollar credit for tires. But he, like me, felt it was the right thing to do. Unfortunately, the tire shop wasn’t willing to do the right thing—nor did they make it easy. No one cared that he was spending a lot of his time trying to make it right. And no one seemed to care that they would likely lose us as a customer.

But there is a sort of happy ending to our story. After all the time and effort my husband spent on righting this perceived wrong, we finally received a call telling us that we would receive a $350 credit—money that we would have to spend at, you guessed it, the original tire place. Needless to say, this will be the last time we get tires there, despite the fact that the tire manufacturer did finally provide us with a credit. It was too little, too late.

But it didn’t have to be that way. This company missed an opportunity to keep a customer satisfied.

What does customer service have to do with public relations and marketing?

Plenty. If your company doesn’t:

  • strive to meet (or exceed) customer expectations,
  • treat customers well,
  • make it easy to do business with you, and,
  • provide a quality product or service,

no amount of PR or marketing in the world can help you.

Check in with your customer service. Seek customer input and feedback. Teach your employees how to exceed customer expectations. Find out how you’re doing.

Additional reading:

8 Rules for Good Customer Service

The only purpose of ‘customer service’