Car salesmen are bottom of class in customer service

A recent attempt to buy a family car shone a light on poor practices and lack of interest among car salesman, discovers DAVID LABANYI

IT’S A Saturday morning. My wife and I are sitting in a salesman’s office in a large Dublin motor dealership.

The salesman is on the phone. On the wall is a bar chart with the names of the sales team and a set of targets. I hope it is out of date. Otherwise, no one is getting a bonus this year.

We need a car. Our current “wheels” are 12 years old, and while still turning, they are no longer suitable for our growing family.

A few minutes earlier we returned from test driving a perfectly competent, if uninspiring, family saloon.

As the salesman puts down the phone, we enter the final stages of what we have come to know as the “car test dance”.

The price is discussed. The “cash price” – that is, without a trade-in – is about €1,000 lower than if we were trading in. The dealer does not want our 12-year-old wheels.

He knocks off a couple of hundred euro, equivalent to less than 3 per cent, and says this is the best he can do, as the car is “priced to sell”. If he was to reduce it any more, he would be making a loss, he says.

We try to look appreciative of his offer but I fear the expressions look pained. The last step of the dance is for the salesman to take both our mobile numbers.

At every one of the dozen or so show rooms we visit, without fail, the final stage is for the salesman (and it is always a man) to takes our mobile numbers. It is not clear why they do this.

They never phone.

Like a deranged debutant, I have been handing out my number to car salesmen in Leinster, Connacht and parts of Munster. Ignored: by all of them.

The shame.

One would think that having taken the time to drive to a car showroom, having shown enough interest in a car to test drive it, that the phone would trill a day or two later with an enthusiastic salesman asking (again) our thoughts on the car? But they never do.

From the outside, not capitalising on this level of initial interest seems counterproductive.

This is compounded our sense that car salesmen make only the most perfunctory effort to understand what exactly we, as customers, want.

The opening conversational gambit is usually along the lines of: “Do you see anything you like?” not “What are you looking for?” The difference is subtle, but the latter opens a wider range of possibilities for the salesman.

At one garage, the salesman sat with feet up on the table, asked what car we were interested in and one-handed, threw the appropriate keys, while inviting us to “take a look”.

He added helpfully that the car in question “was the best in the yard” and that another interested customer had just gone to speak to his bank about it. The car is still advertised for sale, four weeks later.

Because of pressure to sell those cars in stock, it is understandable that salesmen rapidly lose interest if it looks a potential customer won’t be buying one of those.

However, this may be a wasted opportunity. We were surprised that questions about what we were looking for rarely strayed beyond “petrol or diesel?” or “saloon or hatchback?”

Like most prospective buyers, we had starting points, such as cars we liked or knew because friends and family drove them. We wanted a family saloon, ideally diesel, possibly late 2008 to avail of the lower VRT rates, and relatively low mileage.

We had priorities but were also open to possibilities. A Sporty hatchback perhaps, or estate, instead of a saloon? To be honest, no idea, but let’s try them.

From the customer point of view, by failing to find out exactly what the prospective buyer wants, the salesman limits his chance of a sale. By knowing a particular car was being sought, the salesman could then make decisions regarding other trade-ins. Then those diligently collected phone numbers would become a resource. A garage would know before it takes in a car whether there is interest in it and could ring customers looking for such a vehicle: “You were looking for a diesel saloon with X miles and a Y-sized engine? Well guess what arrived today.”

This information gathering failure – for that is what it is – is particularly odd when it comes to main dealers.

From our experience, the majority of main dealers’ salesmen will not refer the buyer to another showroom in the group which may have a car matching their criteria.

But surely operating independently is a waste of the initial interest shown in that brand of car by a potential buyer.

A further frustration was the apparent lack of knowledge by some of the salesmen of vehicles they were trying to sell, including at the main dealers.

After test driving a petrol car that met many of our criteria we asked about its fuel efficiency? “Ah, it’s great, nearly as good as a diesel but far cheaper to buy” was the answer. While this response may, in the strictest sense, be true (while also providing some unsought comparative data) it did not help us decide between car A and car B.

Pressing the matter, we were advised look it up on the “interweb” – which we did, only to find out the car had the thirst of a shipwrecked sailor adrift on the waves.

Then there is the simple, annoying chore of getting to a dealership to examine the cars. I presume the majority of people buying a car are busy working on weekdays. I also presume most people opt not to spend precious holidays driving around garages.

So the decision by most dealers to close on Sundays and for others to lock up early on Saturdays seems, well, odd.

Wages and other costs are surely a factor in this, but a case could be made for closing or having a half-day on a Monday or Tuesday and opening all weekend.

There were other minor frustrations. Such as when we wanted to test drive what seemed like the only 2008 saloon version of a popular family car available in Dublin at the time. We drove to the main dealer – having phoned first to check it was still available – only to find a mechanic, who was using the car to get to and from work at the time, was out sick. “He should be back next week,” we were told.

One final frustration for a prospective car buyer is the emergence of car import websites.

These sites appear to offer loads of competitively priced cars, all helpfully based at dealers “in Dublin”.

On enquiry, however, it turns out the car is actually in an industrial park somewhere in the UK and can only be viewed if you first agree to buy the car.

Most of the main car search websites are littered with these ads which, to be frank, aren’t “available in Ireland”.

The Dublin bit refers to the the industrial estate to which the car will be delivered when you buy it. If I wanted a UK car, I’d examine UK car websites and cut out the middle man.

Mentioning our experiences to others in the Motorsteam, someone suggested a reason for the lack of call backs from salesmen: "Maybe they are too busy selling cars and are tired of tyre kickers."

Which brings us to the role of the car buyer.

Admittedly, we are a cagey lot, reluctant to say what we can afford, always looking for a lower price, wanting a new set of tyres “thrown in” and mumbling about extended warranties.

And we can break a poor salesman’s heart. We spoke to one dealer in Co Wicklow a couple of weeks ago to inquire about a car. “Sorry, that car’s gone. Man’s gone to the bank to get the draft.”

Talking to the same dealer about another car two weeks later he happened to mention that the bank had refused to provide a loan for the first car, but not before the garage had fitted, as requested, a rear spoiler not even a alco-pop addled boy racer would consider. “The spoiler’s not too bad,” the dealer said, knowing he would be looking at the car in the yard for quite some time.

And some car buyers just can’t drive. Terrifying, but true. I overheard staff at one garage muttering furiously about a customer who had reversed a 2009 saloon into a pillar. “The car had parking sensors for **** sake!”