The IT Nerd

This keeps getting better and better…..

I had a call with my lawyer this morning in regards to this circus and upon hearing that my wife and I had not received a call back from Toyota Canada, he advised me to call them back and ask the following question: “On the advice of my lawyer, I am calling to see if my case has been assigned and when I can expect to hear from the person it is assigned to.” I did that  and was told that it had been assigned to someone and they will get back to me shortly. I told the person that I would feed that information back to my lawyer and thanked them.

10 Minutes later I got a call from Toyota Canada. Coincidence? I think not.

The customer service rep first apologized for the delay in calling me back and for this issue. Then she went about telling me that a part was on order and explained why they are replacing this part and they are working on getting an ETA on the part. I took the opportunity to say:

A) This has been going on for months with no resolution.

B) There seems to be a “lets throw a part at the car and see if it fixes the problem” approach to this which is lame.

C) How much longer is this going to take before I have a fully functioning car?

The rep assured me that Toyota Canada was doing everything possible to deal with the issue and this was going to get fixed.

You’ll excuse me if I didn’t exactly jump for joy upon hearing that.

In any case, after I got off the phone I fed this info back to my wife who wasn’t happy at the news but we decided to live with it for now. That was until our dealer called ten minutes later with the wonderful news that the part was backordered until the 17th of February.

WTF?!?

So my wife (who is now beyond pissed at this point) and I got back on the phone with the Toyota Canada rep who said “It’s not Feb 17th, it’s expected in Feb 3rd.”

My friends, that’s one hell of a disconnect between Toyota Canada and the dealer.

My wife then took the opportunity to express her displeasure at the customer service experience thus far, and I took the opportunity to to point out that we both had better things to do than to chase this issue and we wanted our car back working properly in the shortest amount of time possible. The Toyota Canada rep then said that she would call us back today to confirm the ETA as well as speaking to the in house mechanics who were handling the issue with the dealer to ensure that “parts are not being replaced for no reason” which I think translates to “figuring out WTF is actually wrong with the car.”

I must admit, I am still less than impressed with the response as there doesn’t seem to be any co-ordination between the dealer and Toyota Canada. Plus it seems that they both are reacting to us rather than being proactive and doing everything possible in the shortest amount of time to fix the issue with the car. That doesn’t bode well in my books.

But at least there was some sort of apology today from Toyota Canada. That I suppose is some amount of progress.

UPDATE: The rep from Toyota Canada called back as she promised. She confirmed that the part in question will arrive on Feb. 3. She also told us that they (via their in house mechanics) have instructed the dealer to take the part from our Matrix that they think might be malfunctioning and put it into a new and similar car to see if they can reproduce the issue. Interesting. Also of note, the rep mentioned that a “district manager” was also involved as well as the in house mechanics. It now seems that Toyota Canada has decided to put resources behind resolving this issue. That’s somewhat reassuring. But the only true reassurance will come when the problem is fixed in the shortest time possible.

UPDATE #2: Our loaner is being upgraded to a Toyota Corolla which I will pick up this afternoon. Interesting…. Also the dealer is apparently working on the car as I type this and asking me some very specific questions (I had to communicate with my wife to get the answers to some of them). Seeing as the parts are still on order, one has to assume that they are playing a game of “swap the parts” from a similar car that Toyota Canada asked them to use to see if they could replicate the issue. It also proves that Toyota Canada may actually be serious about solving this issue. That is starting to inspire some confidence.

This entry was posted on January 29, 2009 at 2:01 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Customer Service, Toyota. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.