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Customer service gone bad: How Honda almost won the battle, but then lost it and the war
If you’ve followed me on Facebook, then you are aware of an ongoing battle I (and many others) have had with Honda about the quality of their paint jobs on their new Civic models from 2006 until today. I can still remember how excited I was to buy a new Civic in ’06. The car was much roomier than comparable models and it’s gotten excellent gas mileage, sometimes as high as 40mpg on the highway. I have about 115k miles on it in 7 years and it still runs beautifully.
But about two years ago the paint started to flake along the roof, and it progressively got worse. I reached out to my local Honda dealer, Sunset Honda in San Luis Obispo, and was basically told that I “park my car in the sun too much”. I responded with, “So does everyone else around me, it’s California…what else can I do?” Basically I was told the problem was mine.
I reached out to the dealer who sold me the car (Penske in Ontario) and while they were much nicer, they were clearly not interested in repainting the car. I got a couple of quotes myself on a repaint, one of which was more than the actual original sticker price of the car.
I reminded both dealerships that I was a good Honda customer, and was soon to be in the market for a mini-van, and the Odyssey caught my eye…but not if it was going to look like broken eggshells in 4 or 5 years. If they weren’t going to stand behind their product I wouldn’t buy another vehicle from them. There was no way that this problem was naturally occurring and the only logical explanation was a faulty paint job.
Nope.
Over the next couple of years my car continued to get worse, and after some soul searching, I decided that I’d never recoup the value of my car if I spent that kind of money on a paint job. Since it still ran well, I decided I’d run it into the ground instead, try to squeeze another 6 or 7 years out of it. In the meantime, I commiserated with other Honda owners in the same situation and came to realize something.
There were thousands of Hondas out there just like mine, all with faulty, flaking paint. And Honda continued to blame sunlight and waxing and UV rays and whatever it could come up with to refuse to address that it obviously had a defective product.
Of course in the meantime, since my car was no longer under warranty, I stopped going to Sunset Honda for service. There’s several hundred dollars of revenue a year down the drain right there.
About two months ago, I received a surprise in the mail, so innocuous that we almost didn’t open it. It was a letter from Honda extending the warranty on paint for Civics like mine and offering to paint the car at no charge!
Hallelujah, right?
Well, sort of. See, while they were offering to paint it, they were going to make sure that it was as inconvenient as possible to do so. They only offered a six month time frame to get the repaint done. That was ok, but when I called the dealership to schedule, they said that they would need to have the car for two weeks to do the paint job, and no, they couldn’t expedite that.
Ok, two weeks isn’t bad if I have a loaner car…but no. Since, in the words of the Honda service technician, they were doing me a favor and helping me out by repainting my car, they were not going to offer a loaner.
Super. Would they reimburse the cost of a rental?
No.
So basically, I had to endure the inconvenience and cost of replacing my transportation while they “helped me out”.
I solved that problem by scheduling my paint job over a time where I was either out of work on vacation or traveling out of the area to minimize inconvenience on my family.
Intriguingly, while waiting for my car to get painted, I discovered that there was a class-action lawsuit filed against Honda (http://www.topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news/2185-honda-defective-paint-class-action-lawsuit) . So much for the idea that they had decided a repaint was the honorable thing to do, eh?
Once my car was painted, I wanted to pick it up on a Saturday, mostly because I didn’t want to have to interrupt work or my family schedule to do so. I got a call from Sunset Honda saying that I could pick it up, but it was extremely inconvenient for them because they don’t like to have repaints picked up while the primary technician was out of the office.
Making it crystal clear that my convenience was unimportant to them. Sweet.
But I picked it up on Saturday anyway, since I’m a rebel that way. The technician on duty at Sunset handed me my completed paperwork and then congratulated me on the repaint. I told him it looked fine. And he then graced me with this fantastic statement completely lacking in self-awareness:
“What other car company would repaint your car for free at 114,000 miles?”
Let’s see. One that also failed to paint it properly the first time? One that thinks they are
doing me a huge favor by fixing their faulty product? One that also completely missed the boat and a chance to gain a bunch of loyal customers by stepping up and fixing it right away? One that has now completely lost me as a customer?
Yeah, that company.
At the very least, the car pretty much looks like new. They painted everything except the bumpers.
You’d think that’s the end of it, but no, today the seal at the top of my windshield has started to come off…as near as I can tell they didn’t seal it completely. I’ll be taking that to my personal mechanic, because the last thing I want is for Sunset Honda (or any other Honda) to be involved in my automotive business. I’ll take my next $30k+ purchase to someone else.
One can only imagine, based on the number of other people I know with this problem, that there are now thousands of dissatisfied customers out there. I see Hondas with bad paint jobs every day now when I am out and about. And when I show the photos to my friends, they say they start seeing Hondas in the same situation. One wonders what that does to people who might have been considering buying a Civic or an Accord.
Or an Odyssey.
Well played, Honda. Well played.
Keys to a good technical interview
Hi there,
So you see these all the time, especially on job sites or on MSN.com. The keys to nailing the interview. I have a few myself, and I thought I’d share them with you all. Who knows, maybe it will help you when you are faced with the dreaded technical interrogation.
If you can’t explain it, it shouldn’t be on your resume
I realize that people tend to put everything on their resume that they’ve ever encountered, either at work or in the classroom. This certainly tends to make a resume more appealing, more engaging, and implies a breadth and depth of experience.
The problem occurs when the candidate doesn’t really know the skill they’ve listed, and are not prepared to discuss the skill or technology in depth. Let’s face it, if you can’t explain to me how to store someone’s name in a database table, you probably shouldn’t have any database technologies on your resume. And the same goes for web design or web development. If you can’t explain the basic functional tags of HTML, such as tables and divs, or you can’t tell me what CSS stands for (Cascading Style Sheets), anything related to front end web design probably shouldn’t be on your resume.
Be prepared for niche assignments to work against you…and prepare to counter it
If your work history is peppered with contract jobs, or your technical expertise is limited due to the type of work you’ve done, it’s probably in your best interest to be able to list on your resume technologies outside of your normal job functions. For example, if you have mostly been a Windows developer, take the time to learn Web development enough to be able to speak intelligently about it. If you’ve always been a web developer, learn basic database technologies enough that you can demonstrate that you can work with it, or at worst that you will be able to learn it quickly.
During the course of an interview, I will drill down to determine where the line in your technology stack stops, and where it stops will tell me much about what I perceive to be your drive to learn and excel at technology in general.
Be prepared to justify any technical decisions you reveal
I’ll be honest, I don’t necessarily plan ahead when I interview. Instead, I ask a ton of questions to get the candidate to talk…and let what they reveal lead to my next question. If the candidate reveals that they built an ecommerce site, I might start by asking what merchant provider they used, or how they maintained PCI compliance (the security standard for accepting credit cards). If the candidate mentions a particular technology concept such as MVC, I might dig into why they chose that over MVP or MVVM or standard Web forms architecture. Those answers will reveal the candidate’s true involvement in the project as well as how they think when they design and build systems.
Integrating third party tools is not enough
There are so many niche third party tools out there these days. JQuery for JavaScript, Lucene for full text searching, Twitter’s bootstrap for UI controls. But if that’s all you’ve ever done, that does not qualify you for a developer position per se. We’re approaching a time where people who are into development haven’t lived in a world without JQuery or some of these other tools. As a result, many times they can’t explain what JQuery actually is, or how it actually works, because they are so accustomed to the “magic” of it “just working”. I will take a candidate who understands the fundamental operational concepts of the tools they use over someone counting on “the magic taking over” any time.
Be prepared to honestly answer “I don’t know”
Without a doubt I will stump you somewhere. Well, almost without a doubt! There is no developer on the planet who knows everything, and how you handle your lack of knowledge is just as critical as what you know. If you can’t admit to not knowing, and attempt to answer with a best, perhaps informed perhaps not guess, I’ll likely recognize that for what it is and that will be a point against you.
Bring your success stories, in particular crises or major problems solved
Everyone who has worked in this industry has battle stories. I have a list longer than I care to mention, including the day a single bad value passed into one of our web pages hung 14 million queue messages on 20 servers on a Monday morning. It took me 36 hours (straight, no break) to fix it. That is one of many stories I could tell during an interview about something I’ve faced that was difficult that I solved. Bring yours. I’ll likely ask you if you have any moments in your career that you were particularly proud of, and if you don’t have any, I will wonder how much troubleshooting you’ve done and how many roadblocks you’ve managed to push through.
Communication is key
Be able to communicate clearly and concisely. But more importantly, show that you can communicate with others. Many times developers are working with product managers, general managers, designers, marketers, and others. A good developer is able to communicate effectively with all of the different types of people they will encounter. Indeed, fleshing out software requirements, getting clarity around what needs to be done and what use cases might exist, are all part of what will set a candidate apart.
Jumping into the pool in 2013 – the teaching pool…
For the last four years, colleagues of mine at Cuesta College have been after me to begin teaching part-time as part of their “pool” of instructors. This “pool” is used to fill teaching vacancies for classes that the college either doesn’t have faculty for, or to help when faculty leave, that sort of thing; basically a temporary pool of teachers available to teach a class or two each semester.
I’ve been fighting the urge to take them up on it because I already have so much going on, with a full time job that I enjoy, an energetic and busy family, and, ironically enough, my own pursuit of my Bachelors Degree at Western Governors University…the pursuit of the same degree that I am now going to be teaching parts of to other students looking to achieve the same goal. The irony is not lost on me, but with my industry experience, and my current college credits giving me an “equivalency” to an Associates degree, I actually qualify to teach classes at Cuesta. Seems like my industry experience is finally earning me some value other than my continued employment!
So with that, since I enjoy teaching and mentoring and have always wanted to someday get into it, I’ve been approved as a CIS Pool Instructor. I won’t be teaching my first class until January at the earliest, and it may be the fall in 2013, but it’s definitely something that feels like it will be interesting career wise and a way to see if teaching is something I might actually like. Code Camps and the .NET User Group were always entertaining, and this seems like a logical extension of both of those endeavors, in addition to a logical career extension somewhere way down the line.
Just don’t call me “Professor Hope”!
Be welcome and true.
Rob Hope 