Nice

Just when you thought customer service had gone the way of the Dodo and powdered wigs, along comes this.

You might recall that our car’s navigation system had started acting up occasionally a few months ago. Right now, it works about half the time. Lucky for me, I know where I’m going the other half of the time.

Well, I finally made an appointment to have it looked at again by the dealer, Roush Honda. When I dropped it off yesterday, I asked the service tech if he’d ever seen this problem before. He said that he had, but they had a software update that fixed the issue ‘most of the time’. The cost for the diagnostic and software upload was $84. That seemed fair to me.

So I got my loaner and drove to work, to await The Call.

The call came a little after 4pm. It was the same guy who I’d spoken to that morning. He explained that the software update didn’t do the trick, the unit couldn’t triangulate the car’s location correctly – and it appeared that the drive unit for the system was dying. As our car is long out of warranty (it just had the 75k mile oil change last month), the cost for a new unit would be…wait for it…

$4100.

Wow. I didn’t say anything. Luckily, he did. He explained that they could see that I’ve brought the car in to them for every service interval, and have been a longtime customer. He’d talked it over with the service manager, and they’d agreed to do this as a warranty exchange. They would swap out the unit and my only cost for that would be labor, for a total of $225 plus tax. I said, “So, you’re giving roughly a 95% discount?” He said “Well it’s not like you bought the car 4 years ago, disappeared, and showed up today demanding special treatment. We’re willing to work something out in situations like yours.” I’d say they certainly do.

I had been ready for a fight, and was ready to bring up the fact that I had came to them for service, etc etc. But I didn’t have to. I didn’t have to argue, complain, ask to talk to anyone higher up…none of that.

And as a little extra bonus, they didn’t charge me the $84 for the diagnostic, because the software upload didn’t fix the problem.

The units have to be specially ordered, and one won’t be in until June 1. So only a couple more weeks.

And they’ve just earned a customer for life.