Even the Almost Perfect Customer Experience Takes 15 Years

I bought a car last week. We’ve been looking for another one for some time and not been real happy with what’s available (anything under 20 mpg just seems irresponsible). My father-in-law has a fantastic, nearly 15 year old relationship with a dealership. He’s purchased every car I’ve ever seen him drive there. When Jen and I wanted to buy our first car, we went there.

Jen found our new car online. We’d been looking at imports and this was a domestic. We were looking at cars twice as expensive. This was exactly what we were looking for and it was at this dealership. She asked her dad to check it out. He calls back with the whole story, everything sounds good. All we need to do is drive the 4 hours to pick it up.

Perfect.

Then, like the story Christopher Carfi quotes, the warranty salesperson got involved.

We don’t know him. We know the car salesman, we know he guys in the shop. We don’t know the warranty guy. More importantly, he doesn’t know us.

He doesn’t know the kind of drivers we are, what we find important, or that we wouldn’t be there without the aforementioned 15 year old relationship. Then he attempted to sell us an extended warranty for a car we all knew would be fine for as long as it mattered.

Everything else about buying the car was perfect.