One good way to help customers is to talk to their customers, and that is precisely what Ian Coburn, president of GPA Training Inc., set out to do last Sunday.
GPA Training is a soft skills training and development company with a dealer focus. Formerly, Coburn was the dealer training manager for Navistar. Coburn wanted to get a clearer picture of the impact soft skills have on the dealer/driver relationship, so he set out with his 3-year-old son, an avid truck fan, to the DeKalb oasis on I-88 in Illinois. There, Coburn surveyed 20 drivers with four simple, multiple-choice questions, and got some very surprising answers.
Question 1: If a dealer didn’t give you good customer service, when would you want them to get customer service training?
Coburn says he expected to get mostly ‘Now’ as a response. Instead, he got six ‘Within one year’ and 14 ‘Never.’
“The six explained with their routes, they typically wouldn’t get back to the same dealer location for at least a year, while the 14 relayed they would never go back to that location,” Coburn says.
Question 2: If you stopped going to a dealer due to poor customer service, would you tell them?
This was very interesting, Coburn says. The six drivers who answered the first question within one year all answered ‘Yes;’ the 14 who answered the first question ‘Never’ all answered ‘No.’
