Are all services in India bad - Now its Hyundai

Based on my recent run-ins with various organizations for their services my experience seems to be going from bad to worse. Now its the turn of Hyundai when it came to servicing my car.

Here is what happened - I took my car for servicing about a couple of weeks ago and as always I dropped it off in the morning at about 9:30 AM and I was told to come and pick it up in the evening at 5:00 PM. So I gave them a call just before leaving to go and pick it up and was told that there was some part in the steering wheel that was spoilt and so they have to change it and my car won't be ready till 7:00 PM. So I leave to go and pick it up at around 6:30 PM and was made to wait till 8:30 PM before my car got done. I drive it home, all seems fine at first until I realise that the central locking is not working any more. Since it was not a very serious problem I decided that I will get it fixed if and only if I drove in the direction of the service center.

A couple of days later I got a call from the Hyundai Service station enquiring how the service was and if my car had any problems - so I told the lady on the line that my central locking was not working after the servicing. She said OK - so I said is there something you can do about it now that you asked me - she told me to drive the car to the service station or to call the mobile servicing van. So I asked her will I get charged for it and she says yes you will - that did it for me. I had just given my car for a full servicing and had spent close to Rs. 5000 on it and wasted almost half a day dropping and picking my car and when they call to find out if there is an issue and I tell them about it they point me in the direction of a paid service that I could have got even without her help.

So I asked her why did she call and she tells me she called to just get my feedback about the service and to note it. Looks like she did not note down my feedback as there was no response from Hyundai after I told them of my problem after the service. I think if the call did not help in solving my problem then it was a call that just wasted my time and this is not what I expected from Hyundai.

As I said earlier it looks like my frustration with a lot of companies is just going on and on - I hope we improve and show the world that we are really world class - right now we are not.

Comments

Unknown said…
I too have had such bitter experiences from service providers.What I feel is that these guys lack in "perfection" and "commitment". I am not saying that these service providers don't know how to do things properly but it's sheer carelessness. And commitment - it is there till they get the customers and after that, they don't care much about the customer (may be they r busy getting new customers and tend to ignore the existing ones).

To me, the solution is - Feedback from customers should reach senior levels (in the service provider company) and impose penalty on whoever is responsible for customer's bad experience !!
8:41 AM, December 01, 2007
aadidas said…
Same is the case here in US as well. I've a Lexus SUV which I took in to the showroom for a service. It all started with an estimation of 400USD and I finally ended up paying 3400USD. Their estimation is damn poor and on top of that, if you get the diagnostics done you better get the replacement/repair also done because the cost of diagnostics is (purposefully) so high that you are forced to get the other thing done as well. Worse of all, they never bothered to call me after the service. You are better off on that front :)

But I hear that the service in India is increasing day-by-day. What do you think of that? Don't you see a differential increment in the service than how it was long back?
4:19 AM, December 04, 2007
Sudeep Dsouza said…
There is a big difference in how things used to be a few years ago to how things are now - I could never imagine having a toll free number to call and doorstep service back in the old days - I remember taking a sony VCR that was not working to a service center sometimes as far away as Chennai (when I was in Guntur) since they had only one service station for the whole of south india and then the part that was spoilt had to be shipped in from Singapore and it took 6 months to fix. So things have changed for the better but I think there is a huge scope to improve the the best brands will be defined by the level of service that they will offer since the products will be pretty much the same.
4:24 PM, December 04, 2007
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