Texas Living!

Customer Service! Good customer service! I can tell you what it isn’t! Today I had my 4th interaction with a local Chevrolet dealership regarding an issue with our heating/cooling system on our ’07 Tahoe. Now keep in mind, this is the 3rd Chevrolet dealership I have used since moving here 4 years ago. In the last 4 years we have purchased two new Chevrolets, and have had great experiences with the lowest bidder on our cars. But service departments, OMG – what a misnomer! When we arrived here in late ’05, we brought three Chevrolets with us, our ’00 Tahoe, ’01 Corvette, and our ’05 Colorado PU. All we wanted was basic lube servicing and warranty work. You’d think I wanted the moon. For our current warranty issue, our Tahoe was in because we had no heat from the passenger side dash vents. The first visit they told me they couldn’t replicate the problem. Took it back two weeks ago for wheel balancing and asked them to please check the dash vent issue again. The service department still couldn’t find a problem, and they explained that the aspirator above the driver side seat controlled the computer for the car’s heat and cooling. I explained that I wasn’t using the controls in auto mode, but in manual mode. Got nowhere! The next day I called and explained the current settings I was using, and they said to bring it in. When I got off work that day, I drove to the dealership again, a half hour each way, to meet with three different service department employees. My assigned service advisor, my assigned service writer, and the chief heating/cooling technician again explained to me over a 20 minute period how the system is designed and operates. They as much as inferred Donna and I didn’t know how to operate the system controls and may want to consult my owner’s manual. CRAP! Who in the hell did they think they were dealing with? I was so pissed, I left. I re-read the manual that afternoon and understood exactly what was wrong. It wasn’t us; they were failing to hear what I was saying. I called two days later and informed them I had thought about my experience and was terribly offended by what they had said and their inability to diagnose the problem. I reminded them that I had driven two different Tahoe’s with the same dash controls for almost 150,000 miles between them, and was pretty sure I knew how the dash controls worked. To get me to shut up, they relented and said to bring it back in (are you counting? a fourth time!) and they would install a new master control head. Sounded expensive! I took it in this morning and guess what? It didn’t need the master control head. All it needed was a replacement temperature valve actuator on the passenger side. Well DUH! And less money than what they proposed to do. If they had spent the same amount of time investigating the issue vs. explaining how the system is designed to work and that we didn’t know how to use it, I wouldn’t be writing so negatively about Reliable Chevrolet in Richardson, Texas! I sure hope I get a customer service GM survey for feedback about my experiences with their service department!