Customer Service

I recently needed to have my car serviced and put through what’s called an MOT in the UK. It’s a basic road worthiness test.

The reputation of service centres that do that kind of work in the UK is not very high, quite honestly. Everyone has heard tales of going along with a pretty new car and coming out with a huge bill.

Now, leaving aside the fact that some people are truly blind to the faults of their own vehicle, it seems there are enough complaints about the problem to make you believe that it happens often enough to be a problem.

After all, if the ‘specialist’ in the field tells you that you need some work doing, how are you going to argue with him unless you have specialist knowledge yourself? For most of us, it’s not really an option.

So what do you do when you take your car somewhere new for the MOT and find that the specialist corrected a fault you knew about, for nothing, because it was only a 1 minute fix?

I’ll tell you: you start telling everyone you know. And that kind of advertising is probably worth a lot more than they could earn by ripping people off by adding little jobs on.

Another garage might have made a quick £30, but this one has just made more referrals from that one act than he could have got with a £1,000 advertising campaign.

The car drives a lot better than it did, too.