Karen brought in her vehicle on December 22, at around 8:30am, and advised us that “she was hearing a noise in the vehicle while she was driving”. She instructed us to diagnose the problem and repair the vehicle.
Troubleshooting identified three issues:
1. Bad wiper blades
2. A broken heat shield around the catalytic converter, and
3. A worn belt on the electronic power steering pump. The belt made a squealing sound when the engine is cold.
When the diagnosis was completed, sometime before noon, we called Karen to advise her of our findings. As we began to explain the needs, she mentioned that she had recently replaced wiper blades and did not want us to repair anything on the vehicle.
Our policy has been, and will continue to be, that we contact our customers for approval of required parts and labor costs for repairs that are necessary consequent upon diagnostics.
Since we could not communicate further with her to explain the other issues that we found, and hence did not receive approval to repair the vehicle, we lowered the vehicle from the mechanical lift, and moved it outside the garage pending customer pick-up, and began working on other vehicles that needed repair.
When Karen came to the garage at around noon, she was very agitated that we had not repaired the vehicle. We explained the issues that we found, and she gave approval for the repairs.
She has been a customer of ours for quite some time., and so we repaired the heat shield and replaced the belt on the power steering pump, without charging her for the diagnosis or for labor in fixing the heat shield and replacing the belt.
It is unfortunate that our best efforts to satisfy this customer were unsuccessful in this instance, but we are grateful for her honesty in admitting that “she normally has good service with this (our) business”.
We regret that this customer had a bad experience with us. Nevertheless, we will continue to do our best to ensure that we achieve our primary goal of having 100% satisfied customers.