Problems recurring more with feature repair

The golden rule of A/S service is ‘do it right at once.’ However, the reality does not necessarily work that way, which is more prominent with imported cars’ in Korea. Imported cars showed more cases of ‘the same problem recurrence than domestic cars with many imported car customers’ complaints also found of such. The study also found more of the stated problems with the low service performance group of the imported cars which did not handle such problems properly afterwards, either. The domestic car companies had the problems more with their vertical service centers than their partner service centers, and overall, showed a similar service level to the low service group of the imported cars.

The same problem recurrence after maintenance/repair was 13% for imported cars and 9% for domestic cars, and ‘complaints raised’ were more visible with imports (14%) than domestic cars (10%) [Table1]. On the questions whether there were windows available to accept customers’ complaints and those complaints were well handled, some 60% of the customers gave negative answers, with no difference between import and domestic cars. That is, poor A/S service and complaints thereof were said more of imported cars, but neither imports nor domestic cars were successful in addressing such customer complaints. Also, customers’ dissatisfaction(or non-satisfaction to be more precise) with the A/S service results of both imports and domestic cars stood at around 70s% and in the upper half of the 80s% when it comes to complaint handling process. As a result, the recurrence of the same problems provokes customers’ complaints and improper handling of those complaints escalates the problems even more greatly.

The study put both imports and domestic cars into a group of high (above the satisfaction average) vs low (below the satisfaction average) service performance group to find any differences in A/S service results and complaint handling between the groups. The results showed a big difference between the high vs low service performance group of imported cars. In the overall evaluation of A/S service results and complaints handling, negative response was way higher in the low service performance group and so was it as to the complaint rate as well. On the hand, there was almost no difference between the high and low service performance group of domestic cars, and interestingly, the domestic cars as a whole showed a similar service level to the imported cars’ high service performance group’s. The A/S service problems of imported cars appear to be mainly attributed to the poor A/S service results and complaint handling done by the low service performance group of the imported cars.

Details of which A/S service areas had to do with the poor results and complaint were analyzed as well. With imported cars, more problems were found with repair rather than inspection, and in particular feature repair (recurrence rate 22%) among repair, and complaint handling process was more problematic when the repair costs were 510,000 won or above (at around 70%)

Imported car customers tend to value time more than money, and the key criteria that decides the quality of imported cars’ A/S services are mostly time-related, such as phone reservation process and waiting time for part supply. The recurrence of the same problems is the worst from customer satisfaction perspective as it requires customers’ time for the same matter, again. To make things worse, if even raising a complaint is not easy, either, it could lead customers’ anger to infuriation. The study learned that one out of every 6 customers of the poor service companies had the stated unhappy experiences.

This study results came from the 16th wave (conducted in July 2016) of a large-scale annual ‘Automobile Syndicated Study’ with 100,000 samples, which was launched in 2001 by Consumer Insight, an automotive specialized research firm.

News Source : Consumer Insight