Calls waiting, 44. Calls waiting, 32. Calls waiting, 17.
Every 30 seconds, the number changes on a screen suspended from the ceiling in Ford Motor Co.’s Customer Assistance Center. When the screen is blank, which is most of the time, everybody calling 1-800-392-3673 with a question or complaint about his or her Ford car or truck is talking to a customer service representative. If you’re among those callers, you’ll usually wait less than a minute to talk to one of the 120 to 140 people answering questions about Ford and Mercury products.
Virtually every carmaker provides toll-free help to its customers, and they know that handling your call in a friendly and helpful manner is crucial.
As the quality differences dimish between the major carmaker’s products, the service customers receive, from the dealer to the assistance center, will become a major factor in picking a new car or truck, says Ford Chairman Alex Trotman.
If you’ve got a problem and the carmaker can solve it, research shows you’ll be more loyal than if you never had a problem.
More than half the average 6,000 calls Ford receives every day have easy answers. How much weight can my pickup tow? How do I change the clock in my car? (Hundreds of callers ask that the day after daylight saving time begins or ends).
Such inquiries take an average of two minutes to resolve and rarely need followup.
The rest, complaints about Ford cars and trucks, disputes with dealers and service departments, take four to five times longer to handle.
The customer service representatives don’t have a lot of authority. They can’t replace your engine for free or exchange your trouble-prone car for a new model.
But they can prod dealers into taking another look at that rattle or refer your problem to a superior who can order free repairs or take other steps.
“We take the customer’s word for it,” said Robert Parker, a group leader in the Customer Assistance Center. “We’re not here to play judge and jury. We’re concerned with what the customer is feeling and thinking about their Ford ownership experience.”
The customer service representatives answering your calls are college graduates beginning a career in marketing at Ford or temporary workers hired from Kelly Services Inc. for up to two years.
They get 4 1/2 weeks of training in what to say, what not to say and where to look for information. Perhaps most important, every customer rep gets two days of instruction on how to handle irate customers.
“Some customers start out angry,” says Monica Jenks, a trainer with Technical Assistance Research Programs, an Arlington, Va.-based consulting firm that trains Ford’s operators. “You have to fix the person before the problem.”
Customer reps are hired based on how well they do in a day and a half of role playing.
The meticulous selection and training program recently was recognized in a study of customer service centers by the International Benchmarking Clearinghouse in Houston.
Listen carefully when you call Ford’s customer assistance center. Do you get a friendly greeting? Does the voice on the other end of phone sound as if it wants to help?
“You don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression,” says Jenks. “That’s one of the reasons . . . they start out by saying `How may I help you?’ “
How you’ll respond is always a mystery to the customer rep.
“I can’t say there’s one call that I’ve really dreaded,” said Trish Maskin, a customer rep. “But sometimes after a really hard one, you’ve just got to take a breather.”
Jenks teaches customer reps to distinguish between the caller who is being difficult and a person in a difficult situation. Even if you’re boiling mad, you should receive only courtesy and respect from the other end of the line.
If your car is covered under warranty, you and the customer rep have more options for getting it fixed than if it isn’t. For example, your warranty is good at any Ford service department. So if your complaint is with one dealer, a customer rep can tell you about others in the area.
But don’t ask for a recommendation. Franchise laws restrict carmakers from steering business to one dealership instead of another.
In the case of Ford, however, you can ask whether there is a Chairman’s Award-winning dealer nearby. That’s one Ford has recognized for outstanding customer service.
However, if your car’s warranty (typically 36 months or 36,000 miles) has expired and your dealer has said no to your request, chances are the customer rep will do the same.
“No is always an option,” says Jenks. “But when you tell a customer no, you have to tell them why. You have to give them an explanation.”
Calling the Customer Assistance Center is not a way to circumvent your dealer. Nor is calling Trotman or some other Ford executive. Your call will get switched to the center.
The customer rep you deal with is almost always going to call the dealer, sometimes while you wait on hold, to get more information.
So if you want your car fixed for free, the customer rep will want to hear what the dealer has to say.
“We really try to have the dealer make that decision, even if it’s Ford’s money,” says John Whelan, manager of owner relations in Ford’s Customer Service Division. “They need to tell us who is the customer we should be taking care of and who is the one who is just trying to nickle and dime the dealership or the company.”
If your dealer and the Customer Assistance Center won’t pay for the repairs you’re seeking, the last recourse is to write to a supervisor at the center or request a review by the regional service representative assigned to your dealer.
Explaining a decision you don’t like falls to people such as Parker, formerly a regional service representative in Memphis.
Parker says a customer’s persistence doesn’t always affect the decision.
“Everybody wants something to be paid for,” he said. “It’s whether it makes sense or not and whether the information the customer is giving us is factual” that determines whether Ford reimburses a customer for repairs.
Take a former Aerostar owner of Wixom, Mich. Three times, a brake warning light malfunctioned in his van. Ford paid to fix it twice but refused the third time, when the vehicle had been driven more than 74,000 miles. The owner ended up talking to Parker.
Parker backed the customer reps who told the owner that Ford would not reimburse him for the repair. But when the owner hinted he might not buy another Ford because of the decision, Parker offered him a Customer Appreciation Certificate good for $1,000 off a new Ford vehicle.
That wasn’t as much of a surrender as it might seem. Parker learned from Ford records that the owner had bought at least two new Fords in the last 10 years. That made him a customer worth keeping.
When the owner decided to trade the Aerostar and lease a Windstar mini-van, Parker came through. Had the owner decided to buy another carmaker’s product, Ford would have won the battle over the repair cost but lost the customer.
Sometimes customer reps know more than they’re telling you.
A customer rep’s computer has on-line access to the latest rebates and recalls and links to scores of other Ford databases.
Take the caller from Washington State who wanted to know why the 1995 Explorer he ordered was going to take 8 to 12 weeks to be delivered, rather than three to four weeks as the dealer told him.
After getting the caller’s name and ZIP code–enough information to check the customer’s history with Ford–the customer rep flipped to a screen where she saw there was a factory delay in shipping Explorers.
She didn’t tell the customer that. Instead, she confirmed that the dealer’s information was correct, remarked that the popularity of the Explorer was making them hard to come by and apologized for the additional delay.
She didn’t say two recalls had delayed the shipping of Explorers until the faulty parts could be replaced.
Why not?
George Ayres, a unit supervisor in the assistance center, said telling the customer that recalls were behind the longer delay probably wouldn’t have made him feel any better, nor would it would it have gotten his new Explorer to him any faster.
Nor would it have sent the customer away feeling better about the new truck that he was eagerly awaiting. And that’s what the center is all about. To show Ford cares. To solve your problems if it can.
Sometimes customers call the center when they want to compliment the company.
Whelan remembers the time last year when Trotman changed the oil in an Explorer at the request of Michael Moore, the zany host of the satire “TV Nation.”
Trotman was the only chief executive of a major corporation to accept a challenge to display knowledge of his company’s business.
“We got 100 calls the next day,” he said. “And they were overwhelmingly positive.”
