Has this happened to anyone else? Customer satisfaction surveys

Cars / Motoring / Insurance
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We’ve had various cars since we moved to France and have encountered dodgy practice on a few occasions. We’ve had Dacias, Renaults, a Toyota and an Opel.

With Renault Narbonne, every time the car is serviced there is a questionnaire sent by an independent organisation. A while back, as the service department person walked you back to the car they would gently explain that only scores of 9 or 10 counted, so not to botherwith 8 or less. I ignored this and put the scores i thought, if I replied at all, but after a while I said that I’d been advised what marks to give. I don’t know if it was my doing but they did stop asking for a while. Nos they’ve started again.

Then with Opel this year when I bought a new car they emailed to say that a survey was coming and that these were the exact scores and answers I should give. I just can’t do this, it takes away the whole point of doing a survey.

Looking at the survey I could see that the garage hadn’t done several of the things they should have done - until they knew the survey was coming to me, I’m guessing.

Then the sales manager rang and talked to me about the survey and I said I couldn’t give answers that were lies. Rather than have me tell it as it was, he told me to ignore the survey. Even then someone else emailed but I finally closed down the conversation by saying that his boss told me it was OK not to bother. I only avoided doing the survey because I need them to service my car in the future and it didn’tlook as if my details were anonymous.

Is it because I’m female and foreign or have other SFers come across this?

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To be honest I wouldn’t even bother to respond to anything in the first place. YOU are the customer, if you are not happy you vote with your feet and over 30+ years of buying new and second hand vehicles in France, we always stuck with our local garagiste once the dealership obligatory first service was done - never trusted any of them as much as our local bloke. Find yourself a decent local garage and if you like them, stick with them, they can be a godsend should you have a problem and they will be cheaper too!

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Maybe I’m wrong but I thought using the main dealer was important for the guarantee.

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Not always. Usually just for the first couple of services. A lot of guarantees are from the constructor not the sellers.

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I think if it’s a brand new car you may be tied to them for a while, but after that find an independent.

My experience with car main dealers (in the UK) has been uniformly bad - if they had asked me to “fix” a survey on their behalf I would have laughed at them.

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TBH IMO consumer law may exist, but seems more mocked by providers and administratively harder to enforce your rights on, here in F. Part of it I think is cultural, but I’m still learning and trying to understand the different assumptions that seem to be the underlying base for quite a lot here.

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I think with surveys, if you can, try not to give lower than a 3 out of 5, say, or 6 out of 10, even if you leave a $hitty commenrt. I am certain answers regarded as ‘extreme’ (but only if negative :frowning: are automatically screened out by most of these syatems. So keep your comment seen, maybe ? At least, until more sites uae AI to skim comments as well.

That’s different to, say, Trustpilot, that clearly has a deal with a number of sellers I’ve observed that reviews under 4/5 will not be published on the seller’s site. Though I suspect the seller does receive them. To the extent that I don’t give reviews if a Trustpilot screen pops up, and disregard most ratings if not the comments,

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I had a bad experience with Trustpilot too - in effect, the companies I reviewed negatively bullied TP into removing the review - hadn’t realised it was part of their business model but I’m not surprised.

Never had too much of a problem at the VW place we now use (no “instructions”, anyway, and good - if expensive - service) but at the former one, in Chinon, we had Fawltyesque customer service from the receptionist, so bad that it prompted Madame to complain to their head office (looking at the reviews on Google, we weren’t alone). Unsurprisingly, no invitation to review that place!

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I gave a factual review on Google, for the delivery office of GLS their mapping unfortunately puts me onto. 1 star and exactly what they had done all provable. Reviews to Google can be done and will appear on Google Maps and come up on searches - so IMV are currently relatively reliable.

GLS asked Google to remove it quickly after it was posted, so they did. I clicked the button to appeal the removal to Google, and added proof snd detail in my challenge to Google, of the removal.

Luckily GLS had asked for its removal so quickly so I could also still Edit the original review. So I added in the multiple calls that I had made to GLS Customer Service for help, and been repeatedly lied to and fobbed off (that’s balayé in French). I did this because GLS was commenting on every review saying call our [wonderful] Customer Service for every problem.

Google upheld my appeal, taking about five days to consider it, and my review was reinstated. Last time I looked it had had a thousand+ views. That was a month ago and it had only been up a month.

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Just what I have been doing, until today.

When my Peugeot 307HDi broke down,

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the recovery truck took it, unasked, to a garage in Vire which had been recommended to me by a neighbour many months earlier. It has many very favourable reviews and all has gone well until today.

It’s a Mr & Mrs enterprise plus a revolving crew of a mechanic or two, who come and go. I don’t see that as a good sign but Mrs. managing the office [when she’s in] has always been very pleasant and helpful. Le Patron has his moods - you never know.

After 2 favourable C.T.'s the one last month declared the UK orientation of the rear fog/reversing lights a fail. I’m told that it’s at their discretion and this time it was deemed ‘Non Fav’. Mrs did a photocopy of the C.T. I saw her do it.

I bought a pair of EU rear lights from an identical EU car. As soon as they arrived I writ large on them ‘EU’ to avoid confusion. I fitted them myself - two screws, 5 mins per light - and the UK marked lights were left in the boot. They might fetch a bob or two back in UK.

When I went for the RdV the boss had no notion of the C.T. photocopy and quipped that it was probably in ‘la poubelle’. I did not find that at all ‘drole’.

The result of the work - €162.xx - was that nothing had changed. The boss didn’t pass on to his lad that there was now a set of EU lamps fitted and the work required was now to switch the cables L <> R.

But the thing that has irked me terminally is that nobody - not the lad that did the work nor the boss - actually checked that the lights now operated in euromode. I did that after I collected the car, backed up to the plate glass windows of Carrefour.

It took some time to convince them that, irrespective of which set of plastics were mounted, the result was that the lights still showed in UK mode, not euromode. Finally, everyone peering at the back end of the 307, they agreed that all was as UK original. Back to Sq 1.

The other C.T. fail was outer steering arm ball joint. I got a ‘devis’ from Roady, which I think is part of the Intermarche group. Sort of Halfords/Kwikfit.fr. €164.

I also got a ‘devis’ from the garagiste. He decided that both ends of the O/S [right] steering arm needed replacing.

This may be true in best practice but the C.T. only failed the outer u.j. That, in my state of finance, would do. I reasoned that if the inner u.j. was unsafe, it would also have been a fail.

Mrs Garagiste ran the numbers and said that the manufacturers of the parts they would buy stated the times taken to fit them. The result was their devi was almost double - €320 - the Roady devi.

I took the original Roady devi back to them. It had expired a month earlier but the job was booked in on the same numbers, saving €156.

I asked both outfits for a quote to change the cambelt. Roady came in €100, to the odd cent, cheaper.

The upshot is that I can’t trust the garagiste to carry out the work correctly nor to Q.C. work done by his juniors. And that he’s buying in top dollar parts. I was astounded at the price I was charged for oil and filters. I usually do changes myself but with the new Vivaro in for C.T >> C.G. I had them do it all. Oil was x4 what I expected to pay, as were most other parts. A set of ramps would have saved me €100’s

I neighbour very kindly dropped me off to collect my car on an earlier occasion. My recommendation didn’t come off. The work on his son’s car resulted in ‘never again’.