The Black Hole of Post-Purchase Support

As a provider of products and services, it’s easy to feel like your job is done when the thing you, and the organisation around you, have laboured over finally reaches the end employee, customer, citizen or user. Organisational culture is entrained to focus on the sale. But the story doesn’t stop there. There’s a whole world of support that occurs with most products and services long after they’ve left the metaphorical shelf and arrived in someone’s life.

I heard a story the other day that paints a clear and evocative picture of how the support experience can break down, leaving someone feeling disenfranchised while still in their first moments of experiencing a product or service.

A friend recently bought a new electric car. Having made their purchase, they brought the car home and initially all seemed well.

However, early in their nascent ownership, they received a notice that their car had been recalled for an ‘urgent safety software upgrade.’ The notification, despite the seeming urgency was delivered in the mail. You might expect a call for something so serious, but no matter.

As the letter arrived on a Friday, my friend found there was no one to speak to over the weekend. They were unsure if the car was safe to drive, so avoided using it for a few days.

Then, they called the dealership, only to find it had been bought out and could not support the vehicle. Again, a bit of a disappointing outcome. You’d think that a condition of sale would be honouring service needs for customers. Especially given the car was still under warranty.

So, my friend turned to nearest service centre. The service provider’s reception was, to put it mildly, dismissive. They offered an appointment in two weeks time, giving my friend the advice not to drive the vehicle. As it is their only car, this would obviously pose quite an impediment to their lives.

The service provider also blamed them for not reaching out sooner, which was ironic, given my friend had only received the notice a few days previous.

The confirmation the service provider sent wasn’t comforting, as it had the wrong vehicle details, leading my friend to wonder if the service provider had correctly lodged the request. All in, it was a pretty terrible interaction.

It’s hard to ignore how this sort of experience creates an emotional ‘back propagation’ from the service providers meant to be supporting the product or service back to the original manufacturer.

After some thought, my friend rang the next nearest service centre. Luckily, this turned out to be a completely different interaction. The new service provider was polite, helpful and friendly. They arranged an appointment within two days and didn’t even need any of the details, because their systems had already brought the data in from the dealership where my friend had bought the car.

My friend rang off with a feeling of relief.

Two days later the car was updated and all was well.

But there’s lessons to be learned here.

Whatever a manufacturer might state, they should consider their control over the extended support cycle. In this story, both the first and second service providers were part of the approved manufacturer’s network, so you’d expect some sort of standards and quality control set. After all, post-purchase service providers still serve as a face of the product or service experience.

Had my friend stopped with the first provider, they would have been left in a lurch, with a vehicle they couldn’t use safely. This would have forever affected their perception of the manufacturer.

Though they continue to have quality assurance issues and there are significant concerns with their lock-in service demands, it’s hard to ignore my friend’s experience with Tesla’s elegant method of updating their cars ‘over the air’ leaving people free of having to travel into a dealer for software updates.

It’s also hard to ignore how many manufacturers are willing to outsource their post-purchase service provision with little thought to the varied experience customers encounter. I get the economics of outsourcing service provision, but I don’t think this lets organisations off the hook from trying to understand and improve on the long-tail experience that customers have with their product or services, long after they’ve left the factory floor.