A field guide for the service industry, illustrated by real events
Remember How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days? That rom-com with Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, where the protagonist systematically does everything wrong not out of incompetence, but almost as if following a script designed to push the other person away?
I recently experienced the automotive after-sales version. Live.
I brought my car in for a routine service. What I witnessed over the next hour was less a customer experience and more a masterclass in how to make someone feel unwelcome, unheard, and frankly baffled — all before they’ve even handed over their keys.
What follows is a reconstruction. Names have been omitted. The details have not.
Step 1: Don’t listen. Sell.
The interaction began with a question I asked about the challenge that connectivity has sometimes in the care. Bluetooth and the car app connection. The service advisor replied with “we can provide a liquid that cleans everything”. I could not understand how a liquid could solve the connectivity issue. But then I realized. He wasn’t listening, he was just upselling.
I had things to say. I had issues to flag, problems with the car I wanted on record. I spoke. The advisor nodded. And then, with the smoothness of someone who has done this a thousand times, steered the conversation back to the service packages.
It’s not that upselling is wrong. It’s that doing it before you’ve listened to the person in front of you sends a very clear message about who this interaction is actually for. The connectivity problem persists.
Step 2: Forget the promise. Make a new one. Blurred.
Two months earlier, I had requested a courtesy car. Standard enough. You plan around these things.
“Did you book a courtesy vehicle?” — Yes. Two months ago. — “Mmm… I don’t know if we have one available.”
I don’t know. Two months’ notice. No apology, no alternative, no acknowledgment that a commitment had been made and not kept. When he gave it to me, he made me feel like a beggar.
Step 3: You have to pay. Specifically, €5.
Before we got to any discussion of costs, timelines, or what would actually be done to my car, there was an important financial matter to address.
The courtesy car — which, to be fair, was eventually found — would need to be returned with the same amount of fuel it had. Considering that i would drive 40 Km back and forth. It would have been specifically: €5 worth.
Five euros. Communicated with the gravity of a legal clause. I’ve handed over a car worth more than most people’s annual salary. The thing they chose to flag first was five euros of petrol.
The detail itself is reasonable. The prioritisation is revealing.
Step 4: Take the car. Give nothing in return.
I handed over my car. In return, I received no document. No receipt. No email confirmation. Nothing that acknowledged, in writing, that the vehicle was now in their possession and that work had been agreed.
This is not a minor administrative oversight. A car is an asset. When you leave it with someone, you should have something (anything) that confirms what was agreed and what is expected. The absence of that document is either a systems failure or an indifference to the customer’s position. Neither is reassuring.
And those problems I’d mentioned? The ones I’d flagged carefully at the start of the interaction, before the upsell monologue began? When I got the car back, not a single one had been noted, addressed, or even acknowledged in any documentation. They had simply not been recorded.
Step 5: Rules. Many of them. Non-negotiable.
The courtesy car came with a briefing. No eating. No drinking. A list of prohibitions delivered in the tone of someone reading from a disciplinary code.
None of this is unreasonable in principle. Courtesy cars get abused. Rules exist for a reason. But there is a way to communicate expectations that feels like care for a shared asset and a way that feels like you’re already being held in suspicion. This was the latter.
A single sentence, delivered with a half-smile, would have changed everything: “Just the usual, try to keep it as you find it and you’re all good.” Or another easy way would have been to ask or confirm that the way to drive that car would have been similar or different to the one I own. Instead: the list. Delivered straight as a whisky. No context, no warmth.
Step 6: Create urgency. Then waste their time.
“You need to be here at 2:30 PM. Sharp. We close at 3:00.”
Sharp. The word landed with the weight it was intended to carry. I rearranged my afternoon. Dropped the meeting I had. Made a hyper fast lunch. I arrived at 2:30. The advisor was busy. His colleague left the working desk togo somewhere else.
I waited forty minutes. I complained three times. The advisor just told me he was busy. With another customer, to whom, most probably, he gave the same time appointment.
I was pacing up and down like a father in the waiting room before his wife gave birth to their first child. The asymmetry was complete: my time had been treated as a resource to be managed; theirs, apparently, had no such constraints.
Step 7: No clean car. No: really.
I’ve taken cars in for service many times over the years. At various dealerships, various brands, various price points. This was the most expensive. In my experience, getting the car back with at least a basic clean, a wipe down, a quick vacuum, is close to universal. It’s a small gesture. It costs almost nothing. It says: we looked after this.
This time: nothing. They had covered the mat on the driver seat. But the care said otherwise. Not a cloth on the dashboard, not a pass of the vacuum. The car came back exactly as I’d left it, minus the service that had been performed and minus any evidence that anyone had considered the handback as a moment worth marking.
I know how this sounds. It’s a car wash. But in customer experience, the small things are rarely about themselves. They’re signals. And this one said: we’re done with you now.
Step 8: Change the cast for the handover.
After forty-five minutes and what I’d describe as persistent, insistence on my part, the car was finally returned to me. Not by the person I’d dealt with throughout the afternoon. By a colleague.
I had to ask this guy if he could do that. What I know is that the person responsible for my experience that day was not the person who closed it. Whether that was a handoff, an avoidance, or simply how things work there the effect was the same. The interaction ended without resolution, without acknowledgment, and without the person I’d been dealing with looking me in the eye at the end. The other guy avoided asking me for the 5€. I got richer.
The Grand Finale: The Satisfaction Survey
Before I go, I want to draw your attention to something I noticed on the desk of the office. A printed sheet, displayed where customers could clearly see it. It said, in effect: “Your satisfaction matters to us. You’ll receive a survey. Only 5 stars truly counts: if you give us 4 stars, it means we’ve failed.”
I’ve been thinking about this sign ever since. On one level, I understand what it’s trying to do. 4-star averages genuinely do hurt dealership ratings in manufacturer systems. The pressure to get 5s is real and, in many cases, it’s pushed down from above with no regard for whether it’s been earned.
But display it in the waiting room? After the experience I’d just had? It doesn’t read as a plea for fairness. It reads as an attempt to pre-negotiate your honest reaction before you’ve had a chance to form it. It says: whatever you felt, please don’t say so.
They deserved 0. And I suspect, somewhere, they knew it.
What This Is Actually About
I’m not writing this to shame a dealership. I’m writing it because this story, in its specifics, is not unusual. Most of us have had a version of it in retail, in telecoms, in banking, in healthcare. The details change. The structure doesn’t.
A customer arrives. They have needs. The system processes them. At some point, the person on the other side of the desk stops seeing a person and starts seeing a task to complete, a box to tick, a transaction to close. A chatbot or AI operates that way. It ticks the boxes.
The service moment is a marketing moment. It’s where retention is won or lost. It’s where word of mouth is made. It’s where the customer decides, quietly, whether they’ll be back.
A missed courtesy car booking, a missing receipt, a €5 petrol note, a 40-minute wait after a sharp-2:30 summons, a car returned unwashed, a 50’s person summoned by an early 30’s advisor about eating and drinking in the care. None of these things, in isolation, is catastrophic.
Together, they tell a story. And customers are very good at reading stories.
The fix is not a customer service training day or a new script for the upsell. It’s asking, at every touchpoint: what does this feel like from the outside? And then being honest about the answer.
No satisfaction survey, however cleverly framed on a waiting room wall , can do that work for you.
* * *
