Case Study of Satisfaction Research with a Certain Brand Automobile Dealer

Project Introduction

Project Objectives: To examine how well the service guarantees of **automobile brand after-sale services are enforced, find out common problems with the service suppliers in time, and improve the **automobile brand image.

Samples: 108 dealers of the brand across the country, largely based in Beijing, Guangdong, Shandong, Shanghai, Zhejiang and Chengdu.

Survey Content

Pre-sale Service Survey: Image, including hardware facilities (external decoration and signs; internal facilities and environment, advertisement materials, and vehicle exhibitions); professional services of service staff, including service attitude and professional performance with sales people; fulfillment of service guarantees, including elaboration and standardization of price labels, sales promotion and elementary conditions of vehicles; implementation of other supporting services, including offering trial drive, convenience in picking up vehicles, and offering one-stop services.

After-sale Service Survey: Image of service suppliers, service indicators at service stations, service quality including staff attitude, professionalism and maintenance costs (store quoted prices and actual prices); maintenance time and quality.

Rescue Service Survey: Staff clothes, pledged arrival time and actual arrival time, service attitude and capacity to solve problems.
Hotline Service Survey: hotline service duration, access rate, service ceremony, and capacity to solve problems.

Interview Methods: Mystery shopper interview

Field interviews by mystery shoppers, including store inspection, after-sale service experience, and rescue service experience;
Service hotline quality monitoring is measured by phone calls of mystery shoppers.

Enforcement Period: two months

Difficulties with the Project

The survey covered many aspects – pre-sale service, after-sale maintenance service, rescue service and hotline service. Therefore, we had to use various research methods to make the survey successful, and to avoid disclosure to service suppliers. Any suspicion from suppliers' part could have resulted in uncompleted questionnaires or biased information.

Key Solutions

In face of the features and difficulties of the project, ACMR has adopted the following measures to ensure the quality.

Adopt two mystery shopper survey modes – field interviews and telephone calls by mystery shoppers, to maintain the authenticity and full coverage of the surveys.
In actual implementation of the project, one service supplier received two groups of mystery shoppers:

The first group asked for rescue service with the service station.
The second group inspected indoor vehicle maintenance, indoor survey and hotline ceremony survey with the service station.

We assigned two groups of mystery shoppers at the same time, in order to reach objective, true and reliable results while the service stations are unaware of the moves.

Actual Effects

We have completed surveys of over 108 service suppliers. While accompanying our surveys, clients spoke highly of the professionalism and earnestness of our task force members in dealing with field problems.
Our survey has truly evaluated the **brand service satisfaction and found out problems with the service. It has contributed to improving the **brand image and client satisfaction.