Welcome readers of ‘The Editorial’ and a very special welcome to the dozens of new subscribers that have signed up in the last month. It is great to have you on board and I hope you learn one or two things as well as being entertained. This month we are going to explore in-depth an ongoing service experience I am currently having with one of the world’s best-known brands.

If you have had similar experiences yourself then you have my sincerest condolences and if you recognize any of what I am about to tell you in your own business then be very afraid.

So, allow me to mount a hobbyhorse or two and give vent to my admittedly biased perspective of a small-scale calamity afflicting German automobile and motorcycle manufacturer Bayerische Motoren Werke AG.

Keep in mind, that although biased, like all customers my perspective is all I have.

BMW – at your service

I currently own a BMW and recently had one of those annoying lights come on telling me I had an engine fault and a subsequent loss of engine power. It was an intermittent fault but one that had to be addressed because while one can put up with an “engine fault” a “loss of engine power” is very serious business indeed. Were people to become aware of my loss of engine power it may lead them to question the gargantuan size of my genitalia – the advertising of which is the primary purpose of owning the car in the first place according to my mate Germaine Greer.

So… I finally make my way in to BMW to get this sorted out and the nice bloke in the Service Department tells me he will need the car for a couple of hours to have a look and see what the problem is. After a couple of hours I make my way back to BMW just beating his call to me to tell me that they have finished with the car and the following takes place. Conversation in normal font – my thoughts in italics.

Service Dude: Hi Mr Rutledge, we have found the problem. The $%#^&%$# is a bit clogged up and needs a clean out and that is what is causing the loss of power.

I don’t know what the $%#^&%$# is but don’t want to look silly so simply nod sagely otherwise he might consider me a mechanical imbecile who simply got the car to convince everyone I had large genitalia.

Service Dude: Have you been using premium petrol?

Mr Rutledge: Yes I have

He clearly thinks I am a mechanical imbecile anyway and that this is my fault. I should have asked what the $%#^&%$# is but now I can’t remember what it was called and cannot pronounce $%#^&%$#!

Service Dude: Okay, well if it happens again you will have to give us a call and book it in for a service so we can clean the $%#^&%$# but hopefully you will be ok.

What??!! You have identified the problem, had the car for two hours but haven’t actually fixed the problem???!!!

Now at this point I do what every rational customer does in these situations and I leave. I am a little perplexed. I don’t have time to spend any longer with BMW anyway and it doesn’t really sink in that this might be unacceptable until on the way home that annoying light comes on again to tell me that I have an “engine fault” and subsequent “loss of engine power”.

Three days later I get a phone call from BMW’s research partner asking me if I would like to participate in a satisfaction survey regarding my recent BMW service experience. I would love to! I scored them the lowest mark I could and finished with the phrase “I could have handed the car to the receptionist and got the same result. They asked if I would mind the information being passed on to BMW and if I minded them including my name and contact details. I said I would love to.

This is where it gets interesting. Two days later, my wife gets a phone call from BMW’s service department asking to speak to me. Despite being told numerous times BMW still think that my wife’s mobile phone is my one. Despite being told again they ring her the next day and this time she gets their name and number so I can ring them back. I ring when on a break at a conference and unfortunately the Service Manager is with a customer. An enthusiastic young lady tells me that she will take a message and the Service Manager will ring me back as soon as possible. Her tone leads me to believe this could be only nanoseconds away. Bear in mind though, that as we have already established, I am an imbecile.

The next day, having heard nothing, I ring again during a break in my conference. I am told by another bright young thing that the Service Manager is not there at all today and I leave another message. I am still waiting. This is supposedly someone that wants to talk to me. Imagine what it would be like if BMW were trying to avoid me! It’s been 3 more days and counting.

For a major, so-called prestige, car company to completely fail in their duty of care to service a fault on one of their vehicles is one thing but to make a complete hash of the handling of the service complaint by their customer is another thing entirely. It screams that they either don’t care or are completely incompetent. I am inclined to believe that they don’t care and reading this you probably are as well and that, friends and neighbours, is a thought from which there is no real road back… no matter what you do to the car.

If I have to make a fuss in order to get my problem fixed it only emphasises to me that it is very much my problem. You can argue that in the first instance the Service Dude might have communicated the issues to me better. You can argue that in the first instance I should have asked more questions and been more forthright. You can make an argument that perhaps this is nothing more than a misunderstanding between two people. Until that is you add what happened thereafter when every little detail from the company repeatedly using the wrong phone number to the inability to return my call says that the problems being experienced are systemic and the brand is in the eyes of one biased customer forever damaged.

Faced with this reality I am likely to do what every rational customer does in these situations – become slightly perplexed, be unprepared to waste any more time on it… and leave.

The Apprentice Australia

I had the privilege of being invited to appear on the Australian version of The Apprentice by Fremantle Media a few months back and the episode screened two weeks ago. I was asked to be a prize (there are no words that come after prize thank you very much) for an episode where the winning team got to meet me at the Ivy in Sydney and discuss all things communication. It was a great experience and Carmen, Heather, Amy, Mary-Anne and Sabrina were all very nice people who did an impressive job of playing up to the cameras. To everyone who has been in touch having seen the episode thank you for saying hello and letting me know who watches this kind of stuff – I have always wondered. Interestingly, all of you claim to never watch such dribble but just happened to switch over at exactly the right time and catch my 30 seconds of camera time. I am considerably chastened to have ever doubted that coincidences are happening at an ever-increasing rate and am now convinced that Elvis is probably alive and pumping gas at a service station somewhere run by Michael Jackson.