Playbook, car dealership
The complaint has stages, and the last one is not yours
Complaints in this trade generally have somewhere formal to go once the dealership has finished with them, through a dispute resolution or ombudsman scheme attached to a trade body or to the credit agreement. That changes how the early part is handled, because the process itself becomes the thing the customer is entitled to, and mishandling the acknowledgement is a separate failure from whatever they were originally annoyed about.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for complaints holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- There is an external stage after the dealership's own answer, and it usually becomes available at a defined point rather than whenever the customer has had enough, so the published process is not administrative detail. It is the thing that has to run correctly.
- A complaint about the car and a complaint about the credit agreement travel different routes to different places, and the second one may not be the dealership's to answer at all, which is not obvious to somebody who signed everything at the same desk.
- Three departments could have caused it, and the origin is often not where it surfaces. A dispute about a workshop invoice regularly turns out to be about something a salesperson said at handover the previous year.
- Tone is a bad signal here. A calm message reporting the same fault repaired twice in a year outranks an angry one about a mark on a wheel, and anything that sorts by heat gets those the wrong way round.
How it arrives
- i want to make a complaint about the service i got
- ive had the same fault fixed twice and its back
- who do i complain to above the dealership
- nobody has come back to me about my complaint
- i was told something at the sale that turned out not to be true
- can i take this to an ombudsman
What has to be indexed for this to work
| Your complaints procedure with the stages named | Who receives it, what gets acknowledged and how quickly, how long each stage takes, and what your final answer is called. The name of the final response matters, because that is usually what unlocks the external route. |
|---|---|
| The escalation route after your final answer | The scheme or body, what has to have happened before a customer can approach it, and where their own published guidance lives. Named exactly and only if it is genuinely the one you belong to. |
| Which department owns which kind of complaint | Sales, service, parts, and the credit agreement which is not yours to answer. Written as a routing table, because the fastest way to make a complaint worse is to send it to a department that then forwards it a week later. |
| What you need in a complaint to be able to act on it | Registration, dates, invoice or job numbers, and who they dealt with. Ask for it once, in the material, so the first reply from a person is about the substance rather than a request for the basics. |
The reply
Our complaints procedure sets out who receives a complaint, what gets acknowledged and the stages it goes through to a final response [1]. If you are not satisfied at the end of it, the escalation route and what has to happen first are set out on the same page [2]. A complaint about a finance agreement follows a different route, which is also there [3]. I cannot look into anything or record a complaint myself. Send me your name, an email and the registration along with the dates and any job or invoice number, and it will reach the person who handles this.
It gives the process rather than sympathy, because a customer at this stage is measuring whether they are being taken seriously and a procedure with named stages reads as seriousness. Asking for the job number in the same message means the first human reply can be about the actual problem instead of a request for details.
Where it stops
The trigger. Any message that describes itself as a complaint, any report of the same fault recurring, and any mention of an ombudsman, a trade body or legal action.
This needs a person rather than me, and I cannot record it or look into it. Leave me your name, an email, the registration and the dates involved, and it will go straight to the team who deal with complaints.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never accept that a fault is the dealership's responsibility, because the same symptom can be a warranty claim, a repair that did not hold or wear on a car sold on trade terms, and those three are settled by different people.
- Never tell a customer whether they are entitled to reject a car, to a repair or to compensation, since that is a reading of their rights and it will be quoted back at the dealership.
- Never say a complaint has been logged, escalated or passed to a manager, because it writes nowhere and the only thing that leaves is an email.
- Never suggest an ombudsman or dispute scheme can be approached straight away when the scheme requires the dealership's own process to run out first, as that sends somebody to be turned away.
Questions
- Does it not make things worse to point people at an ombudsman?
- The people who ask about one have usually already found it. What publishing the route does is make clear that your own process comes first, which is both true and in your interest, and it stops the complaint arriving at a scheme before you have had a chance to answer it.
- Can it tell somebody the status of a complaint they already made?
- No. It has no view of any case, file or inbox, so it cannot say whether anybody has picked it up. What it can do is take the details again and mark that this is a chase, which is at least a second route to a person.
- Why route finance complaints separately?
- Because the agreement is usually with a lender rather than with the dealership, and the customer signed both at the same desk on the same afternoon. Sending it down the wrong route wastes weeks of a clock the customer may be running.
Keep reading
- Everything for a car dealershipStock moves daily and finance adverts are regulated, so this is mostly about what a dealership assistant must never claim to know.
- Handling complaints in generalThe job is to route, not to resolve. Acknowledge without conceding, name the escalation route, and get it to a person fast.
- Three departments, three timetables, one addressThe showroom can be open on a Sunday with the workshop shut. One set of hours produces somebody standing at a locked service door.
- The front of a dealership is a display, not a car parkTwo entrances at one address. The spaces at the front are cars for sale, and service reception is round the side behind the workshop.
- Bought online or bought here, and why that decides everythingA car bought without seeing it sits under different rules from one driven off the forecourt, and neither of them is a change of mind policy.
Try it on your own material
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