BMW Dealer to the Rescue

My car died and my dealer fixed it.

I just completed the customer satisfaction survey and I gave top scores across the board – even though the experience was sub-optimal. But you know, I know and the dealer knows – anything less than a top score is a disaster for the dealer and the dealer was blameless.

So here is how I really feel about my experience after my car died – including the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Bad

A few months ago the dealer had fixed a bad fuel sensor that had failed after I let the fuel level get too low. Hey, okay, my bad. But then I had a second failure – the fuel gauge showed half full but, I learned days later, the tank was empty.

The car died in the middle of a four-lane local highway. I was just able to get to the left hand turn cut-out lane before it came to a stop. Dead. That was bad.

The Ugly

BMW roadside assistance – summoned via the BMW Assist SOS button – dispatched a truck to bring my vehicle to the dealer. The truck arrived more than an hour later and it was a flatbed - to bring in my all-wheel-drive car.

The operator of the truck said it was not a good idea to drag my car on “skates” onto his flatbed, but that is what we were forced to do and what the BMW Assist representative authorized. (BMW Assist call center personnel did not know how to get the car into “neutral” and neither did the truck operator.) The car had to be dragged OFF of the flatbed at the dealership after the last service tech still on duty that night could not get the car into neutral either. He didn’t know “the trick.”

The Good

The sales department was still open and one of the sales advisors looked up my name, saw that I was a third-time BMW owner, and went out of his way to get me a loaner.

Points of failure

• BMW Assist call center sent a flatbed to pick up an all-wheel-drive car.
• BMW Assist call center did not appear to have received any diagnostic codes from my car and did not know how to put the car into neutral to allow it to be more easily pulled onto the flatbed.
• BMW of Sterling call center indicated that the dealership was closing in 15 minutes – which was not true. The dealership sales office was actually still open more than an hour later when the flatbed arrived with my car.
• Neither BMW Assist nor BMW of Sterling call centers appeared to know who I was or what my long history with BMW has been. I may as well have called AAA or my insurance company.

Outcome

A week later I had my car back after the dealer replaced the entire fuel system including tank and sensors. Everything seems to be working now.

Moral of the Story

What’s the point of paying a subscription for an embedded telematics system if it performs no better than if the customer had simply used his or her own smartphone and called any old tow truck?

Recommendations

• The call center responders MUST have immediate access to vehicle diagnostic codes and customer vehicle ownership history.
• The call center must immediately state where the system indicates the vehicle is located – so that the customer can confirm: “Yes, northbound on Main Street.” The BMW Assist call center representative never made it clear that he could actually see where I was.
• Vehicle app and ownership portal should provide touch point to report the status of the repair - including diagnosis, arrival of replacement parts. (The dealer called multiple times but we kept missing one another since I was busy, and I missed him every time I called him back because he was busy. Providing vehicle repair status via app or portal removes the need to speak directly.)
• Give the customer some context: Is the failure/problem that the customer is experiencing something unusual or common? I have since run into other BMW owners who have had multiple fuel sensor problems/failures.

My hero(es)

New-vehicle sales manager, Mo Noorestani, of BMW of Sterling was working late that Saturday evening. He asked my name and looked up my history. When he saw that I had been a long-time BMW of Sterling customer he went out of his way to take care of me.

Service advisor, Matt Weller, also went out of his way to call me repeatedly to keep me apprised of the progress of the repair. Unfortunately for Matt, his only tools were email and the phone. A portal for communicating the status of the repair would have made it easier for us to interact and for me to assure him that I had been receiving his voice mail messages.

You can see from the Customer Satisfaction Survey (below) that these experiences do not fit neatly into the checkboxes, dropdown menus and verbatim responses allowed for in the survey. The dealer did a great job taking care of me. BMW did not provide the systems or support to help the dealer really shine. The dealer succeeded in satisfying me in spite of BMW.

The Survey