Toyota’s Biggest Savings promo turn to Customer’s Biggest Customer Satisfaction failure

toyota is presently running a promo, Toyota’s  Biggest Savings , started in june and extended to july. it’s meant to increase purchases of toyotas with some cash discounts and low down payment and amortization terms.

it sounds good on paper but it fails in customer satisfaction after you have concluded the purchase. the problem is not the car itself, the problem is the way customers are handled after you buy the car.

toyota’s biggest  savings promo promises turned into a customer’s  biggest  satisfaction failure.  there are a few components to this whole bad experience but for today, we like to focus on one aspect – the failure of customer relations.

after you buy a toyota from this dealer, you get a letter signed by the vehicle sales manager, the customer relations manager and the service manager.  the letter welcomes the buyer into the “toyota family”, promises “Total Customer Satisfaction”. it also informs the buyer of the discounts the customer can avail of when the brand new car is brought in to the dealer for the standard 1,000 and 5,000 km check up.

at the end of the letter, this paragraph appears:

there were two problems with the car we bought plus we wanted to give feedback to customer relations on the experience of buying a toyota that we decided to write an email to them.

we first talked to the toyota sales representative on a monday morning, paid for the car same day in the afternoon and on wednesday we got the car. we noticed a problem with the car on thursday evening and informed the sales representative of the problems on friday morning and on the same day wrote  and sent the email. we called the office of the customer relations friday afternoon but the manager was unavailable.

we wrote the email in response to the invitation from letter we got from the toyota dealership. also, we thought it was proper to write them. the first email was sent on friday and sent a second email next day, saturday.

wanting to talk, we also made calls to the customer relations manager on saturday. we were unable to talk to the customer relations manager after trying the whole day, making  more than a dozen calls at different times of the day. instead, we talked to several staff of the customer relations manager who kept telling us the manager was on a meeting. we were able to track down the manager who was in a meeting in another dealership , a sister company of the one we bought the car from. but same story, the customer relations manager did not attend to our call.

since that time last friday, we have not received a call from the customer relations manager or her staff or any email in response to my emails to them except for one which was some kind of an automatic response to everyone who sends them an email.

we received this email from them on saturday morning:

that was the only communication we got from the customer relations group since friday until today as we write this piece for this blog.

we actually got shocked by the email we received – it was in shocking pink.  the whole email looked unprofessional and not business like at all. aside from the shocking pink background,  the sender used multi-colored fonts to sign her name and in a style that was kiddie-like.  we had the feeling the sender was most probably on OJT, still a high student. it was too childish and playful an email for a company that sells products worth P1 Million or more.

we do not know what customer relations are being built by the customer relations at toyota when it is almost one week now and we have not gotten a response from them on the emails and calls i have made to them.the emails we sent clearly stated we were lodging a customer complaint, we wrote that on the subject matter of the email we sent. with that kind of topic on the subject matter, you would expect they would give the email quick and proper attention. but we have not gotten any kind of response from them, so it looks this group called Customer Relations  do not intend to build good relations with its customer nor address a customer complaint.

it makes you wonder why bother putting up such a department in a company like this toyota dealership when it does not do it’s job. we doubt if they even know what it is.

the clock is ticking, we wait for their response.