Does giving a dealer a bad survey rating have any negative effect?

[aphex]

They are always so worried about that stuff, does it really have any effect?

Just got one from a dealer than took 3+ hours to do an oil change on my car while I waitied for it (promised 1.5 hours, which is still REALLY high)

 

[BigJ]

I believe if you call the corporate HQ, you can get them in a lot of trouble, especially if they receive a lot of complaints.

 

[Zorro]

30% of there pay for Honda.....

 

[Pacfanweb]

Hell yes, it hurts the grunt employees badly. Lots of places have pay based on it.

Ford, in particular, used to only give the dealer credit if the customer checked "Completely Satisfied". They had "Very Satisfied", "Somewhat Satisfied", and I think maybe "somewhat disatisfied" and "completely disatisfied" as other options.

So you would think that "Very Satisfied" would be pretty good, huh? Lots of customers did...but Ford gave us ZERO for those scores...it was literally just like the customer had gone ahead and checked the lowest one.
We had 4 stages of failure, and one for success.

That meant we had to educate the customer on how the surveys worked, etc. Ford said you weren't supposed to tell the customers you didn't get any credit for a "Very" or lower score, but then the local district rep would come in and tell us to do just that.
That got Ford an unrealistic picture of most dealership's scores, since we were working the customers for surveys. Some places even gave free oil changes for a perfect survey...which was totally against the rules.

I can't tell you how many surveys from happy customers we got back that were marked "Very Satisfied" with all sorts of kind and complimentary remarks in the comment section. They thought they had done us a favor by giving us a good score and a nice remark...and it got us nothing.

We also got slammed for the "Fixed Right the First Time" question....which was really bad on new models, since you'd frequently have to order parts....which meant that even though you technically diagnosed it correctly the first time, they customer had to bring the vehicle back to get the part put on, so in the customer's eyes it was not "fixed right the first time".

They also had an "Overall Service Experience" question, which had the "completely, very, somewhat", etc. options. So if the tech did his job right, the service advisor did his/her job right, the customer was happy when called to come get the car, but the night time cashier was in a bad mood and pissed them off, there went your score on that question.

Ford has changed a bit on their scoring, and they now give you a little credit for "very satisfied", but their system is still bullshlt.
They consistently design crap, have their crap union workers build crap, don't have crap for quality control, send it to the dealers, and then hold the dealer's service department to a FAR higher standard than any place higher in the production process.

I know that other manufacturers have similar ways of dealing with surveys that are also unfair to the people at the end of the line.

So again, YES surveys matter A LOT. Chances are very good that you will reduce someone's paycheck if you score them badly or even not so badly.