Tuesday December 05, 2006

As described in a previous entry, I took my 1999 Toyota RAV4 to Jiffy Lube just before Thanksgiving for an oil change and ultimately ended up at my local Toyota dealership to get my hood latch unstuck and to have about $1000 worth of transmission repairs done to fix a fluid leak spotted by the Jiffy Lubers.

Parts were ordered to fix my transmission and I got an email notification each time a part arrived at the dealership. Most of the parts arrived within a few days, but one had to come from Japan and took longer.

Last Wednesday morning, I received an email about the final part. On Thursday morning, I called the service person handling my repair and left him a message asking for status. No response that day, or on Friday. I called the dealership on Saturday to get a status and was told my repair was done except for the paperwork, which could be finished in 10 minutes.

About an hour later, I arrived at the dealership to pick up the vehicle. The two cashiers were totally confused I was there to pick up my vehicle on a day "my" service person was not working. They couldn't find the paperwork. It took another 10 minutes for them to get unconfused, let me pay, and return my keys.

In retrospect, Toyota's spiffy new email notification option actually reduced my overall satisfaction since it exposed the underlying slowness and inefficiencies in the their service delivery. I'm sure, for example, I would have had to wait till this week to hear back from my service person that the RAV4 was ready for pick up. Which would have been really crappy since we had our first snow here this morning.

Given that any service person can apparently check my account for status, and can also cause the appropriate paperwork to be generated upon completion of repairs, I don't see any value to the customer in having service people assigned to specific accounts. In my case, it did nothing other than slow the entire process.