It's always advantageous when I bring my vehicle into a dealership service department for repairs and routine maintenance. Well, maybe not advantageous for my wallet, but it gives me a chance to check out the operations, processes and customer service in the service lane that I hear a lot of you talk about.
What I didn't particularly want to do was visit my dealership collision center.
More on that in a minute.
I bought a high-mileage used vehicle last summer, so I purchased a service contract for it and visited my Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram dealership for maintenance a few times. On one visit, I parked in the service drive and waited several minutes for an adviser to greet me.
When none did, a friendly porter pointed me to the advisers' offices, where I waited some more while workers helped other customers, talked on the phone or just shuffled papers and ignored me. (I could hear some of you in my head analyzing everything that was going wrong.)
The adviser was dismissive of the couple of items I noted and instead wanted to sell me work on my transfer case sight unseen and pressed me to do the 100,000-mile maintenance even though my odometer hadn't hit 90,000. It was not a pleasant visit.
Unfortunately, the next time I stepped inside the service department was two weeks ago with my demolished Jeep Grand Cherokee. A driver thought he could make that left turn before my car got to the intersection. He thought wrong.
But that dealership visit was brief. The insurance company totaled the Grand Cherokee after taking one look at it. So now it's on to the front end of a dealership to find a new set of wheels. It'll likely be a used vehicle, so an opportunity for new work for somebody's service department.
But it won't be at my old dealership. I'm just glad I declined that 100,000-mile maintenance.
