Mod Friendly VW Dealers

[popp]

Re: Mod Friendly VW Dealers

Exactly what Dan said. What goes on behind the curtains is what makes up most of the "book rate" times. Toyota, VW, Audi, Chevy etc have training sessions which test each job and get "x" amount of techs around NA to do the job and take the average times and set the book rate. Just because tech "A" does the brake job in .5 doesn't mean that tech "B" beside him will do it in the same time. He might do it in 2.5hrs because the caliper was seized on the rotor.

It's no different in any other field. Certain sports perfessionals make more then others because they perform better, yet the ticket price is the same for the fan. Some accountants can bang out your taxes faster then the guy in the kiosk next to them, yet they charge the customer the same.

We just finished a job that called for 9hrs book time. Customer was charged 9hrs, Tech took 20hrs.....Tech got paid 9hrs...... If they went by your "charge the customer what it takes" theory, how would you feel to get a 20hr bill when you were told 9hrs originally.......

Flipstah: Thank you for applauding our efforts and it is much appreciated. I don't browse beyond enough to post on beyond, and therefor can't answer questions they might have if I did respond on that thread. That's what I meant by no thanks, it's not my job to find business and I only piped up on ED because I am a part of this forum. Our CES is up and the customers we are making happy now will hopefully tell there friends and family. For now, that's all I can ask for as its going to take baby steps to get back the rep it once had. I'll leave the marketing up to those that Hyatt hires to do their part.

[Hardy_Boy]

Re: Mod Friendly VW Dealers

it might only take .5hrs to replace your brakes, but i had to get the work order, find the keys, find it in the lot, can't use the FOB cause your battery is dead, (oops, forgot to mention that didn't you) get the car in, set the hoist, perform work, have it washed and parked again, write up a nice story for your work order and clean up. it's a real bummer that you didn't reply to the voice mail about your battery. i waited around with my hoist tied up for a few hours hoping to sell you that battery and make another half an hour. thank you, come again.

You raise very valid points and definitely provided me some insight into how it works, now correct me if I'm wrong. But what I have the problem with is that. I'm being charged for all that "setup" while my car is already on your hoist. Because it's built in to the .5hrs time frame, and in reality it only took you another 10min. Worth of work. Compared to the guy who comes in only to get the battery and is charged .5hrs and in reality that's how long it actually takes. How is it fair that I pay that setup cost for every little job I done?

[Hardy_Boy]

Re: Mod Friendly VW Dealers

Exactly what Dan said. What goes on behind the curtains is what makes up most of the "book rate" times. Toyota, VW, Audi, Chevy etc have training sessions which test each job and get "x" amount of techs around NA to do the job and take the average times and set the book rate. Just because tech "A" does the brake job in .5 doesn't mean that tech "B" beside him will do it in the same time. He might do it in 2.5hrs because the caliper was seized on the rotor.

It's no different in any other field. Certain sports perfessionals make more then others because they perform better, yet the ticket price is the same for the fan. Some accountants can bang out your taxes faster then the guy in the kiosk next to them, yet they charge the customer the same.

We just finished a job that called for 9hrs book time. Customer was charged 9hrs, Tech took 20hrs.....Tech got paid 9hrs...... If they went by your "charge the customer what it takes" theory, how would you feel to get a 20hr bill when you were told 9hrs originally.......

Well I would be upset if I were handed that bill? Yes. I would question productivity, because what took some guy 9 hours, took this guy more than twice that. I'd also do some self reflection as to maybe it's something I'm doing or not doing to the vehicle, thats causing the incresed work load. Do I think its unresonable to be charged 20 hrs for a job that took 20hrs? No. That's expected. I think it's better to charge the one guy for the extra 11hrs. Not inadvertently charge 22 other customers .5hrs extra to make up for the loss.

[Hardy_Boy]

Re: Mod Friendly VW Dealers

In the end I know there's nothing I do or say that would change how a business or entire industry operates, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. (I don't like the way most industries operate in this city.) I was simply providing a point of view of why it gets perceived as a "stealership". As I stated earlier I get my cars serviced at a dealer. Not once have I complained to a dealer about how long it took, or how much it cost. On every survey I've been given, I give the dealership a 10/10. Because when I leave, I'm pleased and my expectations are met. This is the way the system works, I pay top dollar for top service. Now if I was paying top dollar for lousy service then I would speak up.

In the end if I really didn't like it I would go find joe blow with no insurance working out of his garage charging half as much.

[grcarlo]

Re: Mod Friendly VW Dealers

80% of something is better then 100% of nothing.......
-Advisors typically get paid on all of service (warranty, customer pay, internal etc) plus most dealerships have a "quota" if you will for warranty work and get a kick back so at the end of the day the service dept still gets paid for warranty work in one way or another.
- techs do of course get screwed on warranty times like you said however it all evens out. For example: a warranty front break job pays a tech 1.2hrs and customer pay is 1.5hrs. So yes the tech gets .3hrs less on a warranty job, but it typically takes a good tech .5-.8 to do a front break job, so he's still up. Also it's the dispatchers job to make sure a tech doesn't pull back to back warranty jobs and in a typical week, a tech will do far more customer pay jobs then warranty jobs so its really not a big deal.



Thanks, but no thanks. That was in 2010. I'm not to concerned about the damage that was done 3 years ago. New staff, better customer service from now on. 5 months ago our customer survey reports were in the 56% range which is unexceptable! Today we were sitting at 93.4%! I'm not a rocket scientist, but I'd say the customer reviews as of late are pretty damn good which proves that we are doing something right.



I flipped a switch on your mom, and boy does she like her service. Everyone, like your mom is entitled to their opinion, but its pretty ignorant to say that nothing in changed without trying it out.

Let me break it down for you:

In the past 5 months, we've replaced the Service manger who actually cares about customers, 5 out of 6 service advisors, 8 out of the 15 techs, cashier, receptionist, and appointment co-ordinater. That's well over 70% of the service department! So your statement is both ignorant and assanine saying that nothing has changed or can change. "They have done nothing to bring your business back"...... Did they service your car via the Interweb for you to magically know what they are capable of today?


At the end of the day it is ultimately your chioce as the consumer to take your business where your confortable, but please don't judge any business from an experience you might have had 5 years ago. I know I'm not the same person in my business experience and in my personal life as I was 5 years ago, and neither are any of you. Same goes for any business. They are always trying to better themselves to gain more clients and add to the bottom line. It is bad business practice to have bad customer service in a customer service driven business and this is why change is needed. I will not kid myself in thinking that NLVW is perfect in any way and like any business, there will always be mistakes made, and lessons learned, but I can also tell you horror stories about every dealership in Calgary, including the ones you believe can't do any wrong......

P.S. we installed H&R coilovers on a mk4 Jetta today and a wheel alignment. So we are not afraid of aftermarket parts nor will we turn it away. Sorry, had to throw a plug in my rant haha.

Typical response from someone leading the charge at northland...expect nothing less and you guys always seem to disappoint. Only thing you guys have going for you is new car sales. If you want to turn some things around try getting rid of that shitty window tint company you have tinting windows for you and get someone that knows what they are doing, also when you pay for a PDI it would be nice if they actually looked at the vehicle. You can take your BS defenses elsewhere..

[Danaldson]

Re: Mod Friendly VW Dealers

Typical response from someone leading the charge at northland...expect nothing less and you guys always seem to disappoint. Only thing you guys have going for you is new car sales. If you want to turn some things around try getting rid of that shitty window tint company you have tinting windows for you and get someone that knows what they are doing, also when you pay for a PDI it would be nice if they actually looked at the vehicle. You can take your BS defenses elsewhere..

its seems like you have quite an issue with northland, why dont you get off ur a** and stop complaining about it on a car forum and go talk to northland personally.

[96vwVR6]

Re: Mod Friendly VW Dealers

Typical response from someone leading the charge at northland...expect nothing less and you guys always seem to disappoint. Only thing you guys have going for you is new car sales. If you want to turn some things around try getting rid of that shitty window tint company you have tinting windows for you and get someone that knows what they are doing, also when you pay for a PDI it would be nice if they actually looked at the vehicle. You can take your BS defenses elsewhere..

Popp was hired on roughly 6 months to help out that dealership, he used to run Matrix Motorsports and did a pretty good job doing that. for you to come on here and say "typical response and take you BS elsewhere" for him informing people on the forums of the changes that have happened make you sound like a huge idiot.

like Dan said, if you have such a big issue with them then go in and talk to the dealer yourself instead of being a forum fanboy and acting all tough online.

[Ur0Drivr]

Re: Mod Friendly VW Dealers

OK boys...time to reel it in a bit...I leave a link to "Thread etiquette by your VP (Me)"

http://www.eurodrivers.ca/forums/sho...oard-Etiquette

On a side note, I dealt with Popp on various occasions when he was at Matrix / Country Hills Toyota and he was awesome. If he says Northland is improving, he's one of the main reasons it is. I believe him.

[lggolfr]

Re: Mod Friendly VW Dealers

Sorry to revive this, but I googled a question and came to this thread. I have still unanswered questions about whether VW will blacklist you if you're tuned.

Say if I go to Northlands, and they detect I have a tune - does that information get sent automatically to a centralized database so that if I flashed back to stock and go to a different dealer - the different dealer will already know that I was tuned previously?

How about if I got flashed back to stock, and then went back to Northlands - would they automatically reject any warranty work because they have a record of me being tuned?

I am just wondering if this "he is tuned" record is stored in a database somewhere locally at each dealership, or centrally across all dealerships, or not at all (and warranty work is always assessed on a case-by case basis). Thanks for your patience!!

[BaggedGLI]

Re: Mod Friendly VW Dealers

It gets flagged with the guided fault finding tool, which flags it right to VW. All dealers will know.

With new MK7's even with being flashed to stock the dealer can still detect.

[miketweedie]

Re: Mod Friendly VW Dealers

I went to a dealer this week (doesn't matter which one) to look at a golf R. they were more than happy to tell me that they could do an intake, exhaust, and stage 1 chip without affecting my warranty. I asked for more details and they said if I wanted to review financing and get a little more committed, we could talk about it.

Seemed strange, but could be interesting, especially if they'll put it in writing.

[Ur0Drivr]

Re: Mod Friendly VW Dealers

I went to a dealer this week (doesn't matter which one) to look at a golf R. they were more than happy to tell me that they could do an intake, exhaust, and stage 1 chip without affecting my warranty. I asked for more details and they said if I wanted to review financing and get a little more committed, we could talk about it.

Seemed strange, but could be interesting, especially if they'll put it in writing.

Maybe it's like what Audi did with Stasis a while back, where Stasis would have cover any warranty issues that came up...that didn't turn out that well. At least that's how I remember it going down...but I'm older and maybe my memory is going

[CGY_GTI]

Re: Mod Friendly VW Dealers

There are only two "safe" ways to go with the MK7, the most popular of which is the piggyback route (JB1, JB4, Neuspeed Power Module, etc). While these can have warranty implications, you're usually safe as long as you take it out before going to the dealership, which is easy to do. The other option, which as far as I know isn't available in Canada yet, is an APR Plus tune. This will still void your factory warranty, but APR provides a warranty instead, similar to what Stasis did. Cost is very prohibitive here, as the tune is a essentially a neutered stage 1... very minimal gains for over $2,000 USD. So far the APR Plus tunes are only available with a new car anyway, so if you already have an R you're SOL anyway.