Mills Chevrolet
Moline,#2UPDATE Employee
Tue, October 07, 2008
I was shocked recently when I discovered this post directed toward our dealership. I have worked at Mills Chevrolet for over 16 years and I have never seen a negative online comment posted in regard to our dealership. At first I was apprehensive to respond because in my opinion most rebuttals look like two parties arguing which doesn't resolve the issue or situation. However, after giving it some thought I felt compelled to clarify the circumstances from our perspective. Many times when we are conducting business in the evening, (most lenders close at 5pm), we are unable to contact the lender to obtain an up to date payoff balance on a customer's trade-in. When this occurs we use an estimate until we are able to contact the lender. In this situation the estimate differed quite a bit from the actual payoff amount. Once this was discovered, the customer who posted the comment was given the opportunity to walk away from the transaction, which she declined. It is true this vehicle was in our service department several times soon after it was purchased. Mills Chevrolet doesn't manufacture and assemble the vehicles we sell; however, we do take responsibly for servicing any problems that might occur after the purchase. The vehicle purchased was a newly introduced model by Chevrolet. Therefore our technicians were not as familiar with it as with other models. At times the symptoms a customer describes as a problem cannot be duplicated while in the service department. We do understand this can be frustrating to the customer, because it is frustrating to us as well. However, the inability to duplicate a problem has nothing to do with the customer's gender or a technician's motivation, as suggested by the blogger. It might interest readers to know over 50% of our deliveries are to women, so they represent a large segment of our business. In fact we have a female service consultant and several sales ladies. Not because we are pandering to the women's rights movement, because they are outstanding in their positions. So we take acceptation to remarks falsely accusing our staff of discrimination and indifference toward their job. This vehicle had a 3 year or 36'k factory warranty, with a rental vehicle at no charge. So there is no doubt the customer was inconvenienced for her time, however, it is worth noting that she was not charged for any operations performed or left without transportation. We did attempt to help the customer trade out of the vehicle in question. The customer wanted to keep their payments the same with little to no cash down. Unfortunately, the fact that vehicles are depreciable assets coupled with the customer's finance and credit situation made reaching their terms unattainable. Mills Chevrolet has been in business since 1952. It is family owned and operated. Our current dealer principle is a second-generation dealer, born and raised in Moline. He understands that customer relationships are vital to a dealers' current and future success. We would never intentionally upset a customer; this just wouldn't make sense and would be a counter productive business practice. I speak for the entire dealership staff when I say we are sincerely sorry the author of the post had any problems with the vehicle purchased at Mills Chevrolet. However, the omission of several key facts leads to false interputations, which in turn, puts our dealerships reputation in jeopardy. Freedom of speech is a wonderful idea, provided we speak the entire truth.