Chevrolet Care aims to raise aftersales game
Chevrolet Care unveils fixed service pricing, more prompt appointments and quicker parts availability
By Imthishan Giado
Chevrolet has put a renewed emphasis on aftersales service with the launch of its Chevolet Care initiative, a comprehensive update and overhaul of the brand’s servicing strategy.
In the UAE, GM operates through three dealers – Bin Hamoodah in Abu Dhabi, Al Ghandi in Dubai and Liberty in the Sharjah and the Northern Emirates – with a combined total of 20 sales and service locations in the country – that’s 474 mechanical bays, 139 body shop bays and more than 1,000 customers being handled daily.
The campaign was launched at Bin Hamoodah, GM’s Abu Dhabi dealer for Chevrolet and GMC – winner of the GM’s Grand Nasser award for customer service six times in a row. Broadly, the campaign aims to improve service quality across the board in the region, which has over 500,000 GM vehicles on the road.
‘This is not a campaign. This is not a tactical offer’
Broadly, the campaign breaks down into four key pillars: complete transparency of servicing and maintenance costs, support for guaranteed delivery of same-day-servicing, a commitment to provide customers with service appointments with three working days and a 3 year, 100,000 warranty for all Chevrolet and GMC vehicles.
The first pillar is the one most likely to impact consumers – GM has published booklets detailing routine servicing costs for every Chevrolet and GMC vehicle on sale. Every vehicle-specific booklet goes into exhaustive detail about costs for major and minor services for the lifetime of the vehicle and further provides costs for wear-and-tear items like air filters, spark plugs, shock absorbers, brake pads and so on.
These booklets are now available in every service centre alongside touch panels that show the same information. The prices are also available on GM’s regional website – and fixed across the UAE for 2012. Very few dealers in the region publish service costs so openly – only Mazda comes to recent memory – for the simple fact that servicing is one of the most profitable parts of the automotive business. Standardising prices means that dealers will automatically see a drop in revenues, so the fact that GM has managed to accomplish such an overhaul so publicly, cannot be underestimated.
GM’s Director for Customer Care and Aftersales, Luay Al Shurafa is also touting the fact that Chevrolet’s standard 10,000km intervals will save consumers over the long run, compared to the Japanese competition which favours 5,000km intervals, or expensive European rivals.
“If you had bought a vehicle from a UAE competitor versus the new Malibu, you would pay anywhere between AED9,800 and AED 12,500 for scheduled service maintenance up to 100,000km. If you bought the Chevrolet Malibu, you would pay only AED6190,” he said in a statement.
A closer look at the pricing reveals some interesting notes. For instance, a Captiva crossover costs AED 679 for a 10k service – more expensive than a Camaro which costs AED509. Get to the big 60k service however and the roles are reversed with the Captiva costing just AED1259 and the Camaro AED1679. There’s more – ever wondered how much front brakes cost for a Corvette? AED1099, thanks; but the rear discs are more expensive at AED1109.
Al Shurafa promised that parts would now be available for cars within 48 hours from any part of the UAE, thanks to GM’s new $70 million parts centre in Jebel Ali. Inventory at the centre stretches to 80,000 parts in stock at any given time with a book value of nearly $60 million.
The power of transparency
Frankly, initiatives like Chevrolet Care are long overdue in the region. The most common complaint we hear from readers is that they simply don’t know how much it costs to run cars outside of the common Japanese marques. After an extensive tour of Bin Hamoodah’s facility, we’re convinced that every marque in the region should operate in a similar fashion – not just because it makes it easier to journalists to compare and contrast menu pricing, but because customers who pay hundreds and thousands for cars deserve better.
Complete transparency is a great first step – the next is ensuring that customers actually receive the listed prices on their invoices, as well the service experience to match. Let’s hope that where GM leads, others will follow.
