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Thursday, July 18, 2019

The best or worst thing that happened today


The best or worst thing that happened today.

It’s a cold Monday in July here in Ventura. But it heated up very quickly when I got to work, opened my emails and found we had a Yelp review. I went to my Yelp dashboard and read the review.

It was one of the worst reviews we’ve had in a long time. It stated we had taken a Jeep Wrangler for a simple battery test, had taken one week to get back to them, had no communication in between, and still had no answer as we still had the vehicle here. It was the biggest waste of time they had ever gone through!

The temperature in my body rose very quickly as a read the contents of the review.  But, first things first. I got the other side of the story from the service adviser involved with the vehicle in question. Got the story but he wasn’t all that apologetic. He felt he had done everything possible to address the issues, to mitigate the anxiety of the client and to inform them of the findings and possibly needed repairs. Couldn’t understand why things had gone so horribly for the client to write such a poor review.

Second, I searched into my soul, and into my business, then asked the question, “is there anything I can learn from this?” The answer was a resounding YES! I can learn from this.

In every business, there are processes that are sometimes dropped due to human nature, apathy, boredom, cell phones, etc.  I realized we could have done better, much better! Otherwise how else could we be getting trashed with such poor review?

I left a voice mail for the owner of the vehicle to call me back in hopes we could resolve the matter out of the public forum.

When the owner called me back, he started by apologizing profusely. He told me the car was his 16-year-old daughters first car, which they had just bought. He told me we had indeed called him and informed him in a timely manner, we had done everything possible to work with him and a vehicle with a failed battery purchased elsewhere. 
Unfortunately, his daughter wasn’t in the repair loop. All she knew, was that she was without her new (used) car for almost a week now and desperately wanted it back. And no one was updating her. So, she took the matter into her own hands. She posted a review on Yelp from her own perspective of the matter. And that’s what brought us back to the father calling me back apologetically for her daughter’s behavior.

Fortunately for us, we dealt with a father with a strong moral compass who was willing to right a wrong. He demanded from his daughter the removal of such review and she did. I felt vindicated, but at the same time, I did acknowledge to the father his daughter wasn’t all wrong. Maybe in her approach but perhaps not in content.

You see, when they brought the car to us for something as simple as a battery test, we should have been able to address it on the spot. Not a day or two later. I understand there were other underlying circumstances that conspired to delay things. Mainly, the owner wasn’t in a hurry to get back to us.

In that regard, that bad unposted review, will have help us make the changes to become better. Changes that without that bad review, we may not have considered. Thank you, Emma. Next time call us first please!

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