A lot of businesses have a routine fix method and not much else.
I recently purchased a Kawasaki ninja 250r. It’s cardinal red and when the sunlight bounces off the chrome, it will definitely catch your eye. Appealing from afar, yes, but the motorcycle wouldn’t go faster than 60 mph. This meant I couldn’t take it on the expressway to visit my family.
The dealership I bought it from said it wouldn’t be good to ride it on the expressway. Everything I read online said otherwise. After viewing four different forums, the consensus was that it should go 80-95 mph. I’m wise not to believe everything on the internet, so I brought it into another dealership which had a service department.
I spoke to six different employees there. Each one of them said that the bike should be able to do 80 without a problem; that “it might even do 100.” The head of the service department said he had no clue. I asked if he could have someone ride it and tell me if they felt anything was wrong with it. An employee did and told me that’s as fast as it would go.
I still had doubts. I brought it to one more shop.
“Wow, that’s as fast as it goes?! Let’s run some tests and see what we can find out.” Worth mentioning after the quote is that this shop owner had no clue how fast the bike was supposed to go to begin with. Guess what he did?
He looked at all the same forums I went on and realized there had to be a problem. He was ready to find out what that problem was.
It’s disappointing when I go to businesses that are there to fix things but don’t. They have a specific number of routine fixes that they make. If I tell them about a problem and it doesn’t connect with any problem they have dealt with already, they think “that’s just the way it is” instead of looking into it.
Turned out a box of fuses fell into one of the carburetors. The shop owner gave them to me with a look of complete satisfaction and accomplishment on his face. I keep them as a reminder to challenge myself and if someone comes to me with a problem, I either figure it out or show them (not tell them) that that is just how it is.
Stay Positive & What Happened To Customer Satisfaction?
Garth E. Beyer
