“Studies show that a satisfied customer
will tell 2-3 people about his experience with your company. A dissatisfied
consumer will share their lament with 8-10 people and some will push that
number to twenty.” – Susan Gladin “How Customer Service Works” (http://money.howstuffworks.com/customer-service2.htm)
I am not a satisfied
customer. I am writing to “share my lament”. I’ll admit up front. This is no
warning. This is no public service. This is public shaming pure and simple. Hey’
they wasted my day yesterday and they appeared to be trying to rip me off so
they totally deserve it!
It started a week ago
when I decided it was nearing time to replace my 19-year-old SUV. I had done
some research using USAA’s car buying service and found a 2007 Subaru Outback for
sale at Lithia Chrysler etc. in Billings. I checked the Carfax report on the vehicle
and found no problems. I checked two different pricing services and found that
the asking price of just under $10000 was reasonable but not too good to be
true. I called the dealership and inquired about the vehicle and said I’d
probably be down on Friday. Lithia Called on Thursday evening to confirm I was
coming, confirm that the car was still there and even set an appointment time
with me for 10 am.
When I arrived at the
dealership on Friday after the 150 mile drive from Miles City (yeah, we are, in
fact, getting to the good part) I met with the receptionist who, after a couple
of minutes, was able to find the woman in Internet Sales with whom I made the
appointment. As promised, she introduced me to a sales person. He asks what I’m
here for, looks something up on his screen and begins to hem and haw “…that car’s
not ready…I’m not sure we’re even selling it…” (NOTE: According to the Carfax
report, the car had been listed for sale since December 12. Yesterday when I
looked at it was January 17. The car had been listed for 35 days and supposedly
nobody had gotten around to prepping it for sale.)
Then, the other shoe
drops…”it has a bit of hail damage”. Yup! It hadn’t occurred to anyone in the
last 35 days that the ad should possibly have mentioned hail damage. It didn’t
occur to Pam in Internet Sales that, perhaps I might need to know that it was a
hail damaged POS before making a 150 mile drive to Billings to view and test
drive this car.
I wanted to see it
anyway. I had just driven two and a half hours and 150 miles for this moment, I
was not going to be denied. Bryan, the
salesman, led me all around the parking lot looking for it. We couldn’t find
it. Then he left me waiting inside the dealership for several more minutes
while he and a person from the Service department looked some more.
Finally, about a half
an hour after agreeing to show it to me, Bryan arrived with the Outback – or as
I like to call it - the bait-and-switch-mobile. Now there weren’t as many hail-pock-marks
as I had feared. On the other hand, the finish on the car was terribly
weathered and the hood did not appear to completely close. There had been no
attempt to detail it and it even had trash in the front passenger seat. It
really appeared that they were not even remotely serious about selling this car
for what it was actually worth. I’m guessing it was there to get folks into the
dealership so they could be upsold…upsold to more car than they needed…upsold
to a car whose value they had not researched…upsold to a car for which they had
not pre-arranged financing (and with which the dealer could play financing
games).
Yes, I should have
left right then. Wait, who am I kidding? I should have left about 40 minutes
earlier when I was informed that the car for which I had driven 150 miles and
made an appointment to see was not ready, possibly not for sale and had
undisclosed hail damage. But I had invested so much time to get here anyway.
And Bryan had what sounded like an interesting idea…
“There’s a 2007
Impreza listed at Lithia Toyota – would you be interested in that?” Actually I
was very interested to hear what this guy had to say about Lithia Toyota’s
Impreza. This was the car I was most interested in as I did my research in the
previous week. I was told before the previous weekend that it was not ready to
show (a theme here?). I kept in contact with Lithia Toyota’s internet sales
person who said she’d find out Monday when it would be ready. On Monday or
Tuesday of last week,, then let me know it would be ready to show on Thursday.
I replied that I would be in to see in on Friday.
I wanted to call on
Thursday night to let her know I was still interested in that car. I had to
look up the ad to find her phone number on the internet. The ad showed the car’s
price had been raised from 9995 to 10795. Luckily I had my USAA price guarantee
printed out somewhere. I called her cell – no answer. I called her desk – no answer.
I called the receptionist and she tells me that the car has sold to a woman who
had never seen it – or even a picture of it. I was irritated that the internet
sales woman did not call me back as a courtesy to let me know this. I was
suspicious that maybe they did not want me to make an offer on the car with a “guaranteed
price” that was now lower than they wanted. I was kicking myself for not making
a sight-unseen offer on this car (at least the hail damage incident at Lithia
Chrysler had cured me of that). I was quite curious what Bryan would be told
about the Impreza.
So I told Bryan to
make the call, thinking he would simply turn to the telephone right at the desk
where he was sitting and get a possibly new story on the Impreza. Oh, good God,
of course not!. Bryan, instead, left his desk and retreated to an “Employees
Only” room that I would later learn is known in auto dealer circles as “The
Tower”.
He spent several
minutes in there making what seemed to me should have been a 1 to 2 minute
phone call that he could have made at his desk. I was growing impatient. I
could see the impatience on my face in the mirrors next to the “Employees Only”
door through which Bryan had exited. Mirrors? Wait. Those weren’t mirrors. They
were one-way glass panes! I (along with
the other customers in the showroom) was being watched. All of us customers in
the showroom were like “perps” in the interview room on “The Closer” being spied
upon by the salesmen and sales managers.
Like those criminals I
was a bit uncomfortable with possibly being watched. Unlike the crooks on The
Closer, I was, mercifully, not handcuffed to the table. I rose from my chair
and moved toward a wall where I would be harder to see from the confines of The
Tower. Bryan made an impeccably timed emergence from the room with an update. “My
Manager is calling them right now.” I acted like this was utterly normal…like
there was nothing wrong with sitting around waiting 10 to 15 minutes for his
manager to make a call that Bryan himself could have completed in a couple of
minutes at his desk. He retreated back to The Tower and I waited some more.
Bryan reappeared and informed me that the Impreza had sold.
He told me about a
Subaru Legacy that was also available at Lithia Toyota. He would be able to
retrieve it in 10 minutes. Against my better judgment, I stayed. I had come all
this way. And that “new-to-me car fever” that Bryan and the other staff were
sensing on me? Well, they weren’t just imagining it.
I was left alone and
returned to my car to make a call to USAA. I have been a member of USAA for
nearly 35 years (my Dad served in Korea) and they had a great reputation. I
figured they should know it was being tarnished by their car-buying service’s
designation of Lithia as a “certified dealer”. I heard a knock at my window. It
was Pam, the Internet Sales woman. I rolled down my window and she asked how it
was going. I explained I was waiting to see another car and was just in the car
to make a phone call. I also explained that I was very disappointed to have
made this trip to see the original Outback and had not been told of its
hail-damaged condition. She apologized – the sort of apology I would expect if
she offered to bring me Coke Zero and brought a can of Diet Coke instead. Any
sense of how badly I must have been put out to come a long distance to see this
car was probably swirling in the same sewer where she and the rest of the sales
force at Lithia Motors had thrown away their consciences.
A couple of minutes
later, Bryan returned with the Legacy. It was priced $3000 more than the car I
had come down to see. It might have even been worth the price. The thought,
however, of doing a $13,000 transaction with these people made me throw up in
my mouth a little. I told him “Sorry but this just isn’t the car I did the
research on.” I climbed back into my 19-year-old Explorer and drove away.
