[Hyundai Santa Cruz News]

Hyundai has recently held their third annual Service Advisor Championship in Korea to award exemplary service advisors and reinforce the importance of good customer service. First held in 2012, the Championship was designed to improve customer satisfaction at Hyundai service centers around the world.

For the third time, Hyundai's service advisors are pitted against each another and this year, 140 service experts from 60 countries were flown to Korea for the championship. These few were selected from more than 18,000 service advisors worldwide and the finals is where their customer service skills are put to the test via a written test and role play.

The tests cover everything that occurs from the moment a customer drops off their vehicle to the moment they pick it up. There’s a written test on maintenance technologies, customer response and Hyundai Motor service. Contestants were even tested on their customer response skills using Hyundai's new Workshop Automation system.

This year, the overall gold winner was awarded to a service advisor from Bengaluru followed by the silver medal winner from Idaho. No matter who wins, the monetary incentive and the chance to travel should drive service advisors to improve their skillset.

Ultimately, this will benefit current and future Hyundai owners as this will motivate service advisors to improve every year and we’ll see the results of this competition when the Santa Cruz starts hitting showroom floors.

 

[Santana]

Smart move since often most buyers don't know that much about what they're buying and when you combine the education part with priming their mind for buying, money comes your way. Great way to complement the rest of what Hyundai has going on. Maybe we'll even see a change in the layout of some showrooms.

 

[Mr.Claus]

I think a lot more manufacturers should be doing this. The incentives alone push them to be as darn good as they can be. It's not just through acting, but they actually need to know how to be darn good at what they do in respect to customer service and overall knowledge of their field/duties.

I have personally dealt with various service advisors from Chrysler to Subaru to Honda, etc. I've only had one good experience. Low and behold, he left the job a year after meeting him unfortunately.

Majority of the ones I dealt with, not only lacked customer service skills, but product knowledge. When you go to a service advisor and they have no idea what is going on until they get their general tech in the room to speak for them.

The way Hyundai is doing it is pushing them to be the best they can to get that reward. Making them try to be better than the other. If I were to go to a dealership and see that their service advisor was a part of this, I would be pretty content.

 

[Santana]

To be fair its how resourceful you are as a service advisor and how you delegate to your techs and even people in sales for the times you need them. If they failed to be resourceful and failed to have delegated correctly then they have failed entirely.

But you really have to look upwards to see what management is like since often that's where problems stem from, which is the reason why I always try to look for dealers that are know for customer service. That way come time for serious issues it will be dealt with accordingly without unnecessary conflict and prolonging.

 

[Mr.Claus]

For sure. I understand there are times when the customer is straight D-bag. But majority of the time the issue comes from horrible management who gets there word across by going through the advisors. So the advisors get a bad name but they can't really do anything about it.

 

[Santana]

It's rare that some customer is like that even if what's done on the dealers end is done correctly, so that isn't much to worry about since its what happens overall rather than those anomalies.

What Hyundai should do is have surveys customers can fill out with the roll out of these service improvements and then roll that out to the public to see, although at the end of the day people will buy Hyundai's regardless, the product is good and that's what matters.

 

[Nicholas]

The main thing is the product you're getting is good and you're happy with it. If you're happy with the product, you could care less about what their attitude is at the dealership because you know you have something good and you don't really have to deal with them.

It only gets suckish when the product starts to go bad and you actually have to directly deal with the dealers attitude, then your in a hot pot.