Servicing the Skoda

[Ozsko]

You may well be right but.....don't believe everything you are told by a service advisor, I was one and have some funny stories of things told to people who asked difficult questions. My experience before I picked up my car and not knowing anything about the headlights was this - I asked the service dept if the could fit the Bi-Zenons as it was a very early build car and I was not sure they were fitted and I wanted them. The service dept came back with a quote of $9000, I kid you not. I nearly fell over laughing as they had obviously taken the view that give the DH the figure and he will go away. They had the car in service doing work on it and all they had to do was look at the lights and they would have known it had them and told me so. Never believe anything from service, it is full of BS. The advisors have not got a clue as they have no direct communication with any floor work at all. What is written on the RO they read to you is what the mechanic was kind enough to write. The spares list is fact or as close as you are ever going to get to it, the rest is a story they use to justify the cost, some fact and some wishful thinking because in the end it is up to the mechanic to be honest enough to do the job and then write it on the RO. Believe me when I say it is a very poor line of communication and people say things that are not fact. In a small country dealer it may be a bit more direct due to smaller numbers but it all comes down to everyone wanting to do their job as well as possible. I owned my own workshop for some years and even there the communication broke down over the same problems. Let me put it this way, if I had asked the question and the advisor did not speak to and get a technician to check I would have doubts and want to see the proof.

[woofy]

I haven't seen a Skoda dealer yet that was that big that the service advisor wasn't talking to the techs every 5 seconds...at Mazda these days yes, although in the past they were pretty much in the loop as well.

[Ozsko]

Oh they talk in smaller dealers and big ones too, I am sure of that but talk does not equal communication. It really is a field you need to live and work in to see what happens and until you do it is impossible to understand how it works. The service advisor as a general rule though it is starting to change, was a non skilled, employee who it was thought did not need to know what happened in the worklshop. Their work load at times is so high they cannot possibly know what goes on and it is highly stressful even to the point that not many stay long because of the stress. They have to justify what is written down for them to tell the customer and it is not unusual for the technician to have gone home when all this is happening. Try it for six months, there are plenty of opportunities for good reasons. I used to have a saying, cars are great it is just the owners that bug me. Believe me, it is a job few go back to once they leave. When you have a workshop putting through 40 cars a day it is impossible to track everything that happens and no one even tries, they just hope that whatever is asked they can give an answer. I actually worked at one dealer that had seven franchises and that was a nightmare. There would be no dealer in the Skoda network that did not have at least one other franchise so Skoda dealers are not that small. The local one to me has the whole of VW + Audi + RangeRover + Jaguar + Landrover + Skoda, that is not small. So yes there are big dealers who happen to sell Skoda and as a rule the smaller franchises cop the rough end of the pineapple in all sorts of ways. What VW should have done is told every dealer in their network they were now Skoda dealers and trained them all appropriately stocked them properly and told them to sell cars. If they had done that though they would have affected their mainstream sales as has happened in Europe, Skoda has exploded and the Passat has gone backwards.

[brad]

ozsko. I'm sure your posts are informative but if you could paragraph them a bit they wouldn't give me a headache. thanks

i agree with a lot you have said about Service Advisors except the 3 dealerships I worked at in the '80s (Toyota, ford, BMW), all the Service Advisors were qualified Mechanics. I'm aware that everyone has different experiences.

[K1W1]

i agree with a lot you have said about Service Advisors except the 3 dealerships I worked at in the '80s (Toyota, ford, BMW), all the Service Advisors were qualified Mechanics. I'm aware that everyone has different experiences.

I personally have never seen or met a service advisor that wasn't a qualified mechanic. It's the career path for any mechanic that wants to get off the tools and into service management.
Of course there are a few that I've met who probably should have stayed on the tools.

[Ozsko]

Yes, women. Nothing against them, I even employed a woman mechanic and she was the most reliable one we had. Besides that I like women as customer representatives if they are qualified for the job, far better than men. Their use as service advisors was a cynical step in using them as a method of attracting men but at the same time a man is less likely to abuse a woman and as you would know there is a lot of abuse towards service advisors. Sorry about the pars but it is a bit hard to judge using this type of format.

[woofy]

Yep all have been mechanics where I have been, even a huge Ford dealer here in the melb, the service adviser actually got under my car and found a fault.....same at both Mazda dealers I use. Not so sure at Richmond Skoda though....

[brad]

gosh. I must have upset one of the thousands of female service advisors that read these forums

[Julian Edgar]

The service advisor at the Skoda dealer I went to clearly knew absolutely nothing about cars. His addressing of a problem I nominated was ludicrous - so much so that I knew that further explanation would be pointless.

On the other hand, I find the dealer's parts people fine!