Fiat is the brand in the alliance that’s in trouble and Chrysler the one blossoming right now having increased its sales by 26 percent in 2011, yet Fiat-Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne is not happy about the latter’s performance in J.D. Power’s December Sales Satisfaction Index study on customer experience at dealerships.
The recent J.D. Power survey placed Jeep, Ram and Dodge in three of the bottom four places amongst the mainstream brands.
As a result, Sergio Marchionne wants Chrysler Group dealers to rapidly improve their Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) scores if the company is to achieve its sales goals. He said that some dealerships’ salespeople weren’t acting properly, failing to make follow-up calls or treat customers “with the dignity they deserve”.
“We’re not top league”, Marchionne told Automotive News Europe during the Detroit Motor Show. “We moved up. But that’s not true of the customer interface. We’re doing well, the dealers are doing well, but they’re not doing well with the customers.”
Perhaps this has something to do with Chrysler suspending its Dealer Standards program for an as of yet undisclosed period. Since its introduction in late 2009, the program awarded large dealerships that met company standards for facilities; management and customer service as much as US$200,000 per quarter.
The chairman of the Chrysler National Dealer Council, David Kelleher, agrees that customer service needs to be improved in the group’s dealerships, though that may take some time.
“Growth has been rapid, and thank God it has”, he said. “But with that growth, there’s a gestation period to build the type of staff to catch up. It takes six weeks, minimum, for even an experienced new sales representative to train before I’ll let them even say ‘hello’ to a customer.”
Marchionne, on the other hand, is firm that the dealership experience is crucial in Chrysler hitting its 2012 2.4 million sales target: “We can do all the Eminems you like”, he said referring to the award-winning commercial. “But at the end of the day this only gets you so far. The interface is with the guy that sells you the car.”
