Five Stars

It's not often that I receive a phone call while I'm cycling. DW never needs to call to ask where I am on my route. My smart watch sends her an e-mail message as soon as I start my ride, and the message contains a link where she can click and immediately see where I am on a map.

It's a clever feature. It also automatically notifies her if I ever wipe out on my bike, which thankfully has never been put to the test. But at least she'll know where to go and pick up my pieces.

My watch and smartphone app are a great team and I rate them at five stars.

My Bluetooth headphones allow me to answer a phone call and talk, though I often have to turn my head to one side so that air doesn't rush into the microphone and drown out any kind of conversation. If I need to make an outbound call, though, I tend to pull over so that I can hear and be heard, and have my full attention on the person on the other end.

Last Friday, as I was a few kilometres into my ride, a call came in from our Kia service centre. About a week earlier, I had taken our Niro in for scheduled maintenance, but I had no idea why the centre was calling me at this particular time.

I pulled over and answered the call.

The service manager asked me if I had received an e-mail message from them with a survey about my last visit. To my knowledge, I wasn't sure, as I don't check my e-mail as often as I used to. I have far more correspondence through text messages and social media.

"If you could please check and complete the survey," the service manager requested, "it would be very helpful to us. The survey is our report card." I promised that I would look and ended the call.

In retrospect, I wished I hadn't bothered to stop and take the call while I was on my ride.

I was once told by another service centre that anything short of a perfect score on a survey was a failure in the eyes of the corporate overseers. And that's really a shame.

When I brought my car in for service, I was greeted promptly and the representative was friendly as I dropped off my key and she arranged for a ride back home. It was a cordial but short interaction. The person wasn't surly or rude, nor did she go above and beyond what I would expect when I'm dropping off my vehicle for service.

A Goldilocks interaction: just right. But when it came to evaluating that meeting, was it worth five stars? No.

I didn't hear from the service centre until about four o'clock, just after I had finished work for the day. I wanted to get a bike ride in and was preparing to change into my cycle gear when the call came in. I decided to cycle to the dealership to pick up my car.

When I showed up at the service counter with my bicycle, I was met with the same person who had served me in the morning. When she pulled up the service sheets, she quickly showed me that everything went as expected and there were no surprises with the car. "She's running great," is all I was told.

I remarked about how happy DW and I were with our Niro, to which the rep replied, "That's always good to hear." I paid, collected my key, and bade the rep a good weekend (it was a Friday).

Was that five-star service? Again, no. It was no more and no less than I'd expect. I left the shop neither feeling bad about my experience nor feeling like I had been treated extraordinarily.

In fact, in both interactions, I was the one who initiated chit chat, who cracked a few jokes, and who bade the rep a good day and a good weekend. For me, I feel that it costs me nothing to be cheerful and friendly to people, so I try to be the nicest me when I encounter employees of wherever I'm shopping or conducting business.

Nice people are remembered just as much as disagreeable people, but nobody looks forward to seeing the return of a disagreeable person. It's the nice person who we all look forward to encountering again.

When I returned home after my ride, I checked my e-mail and, sure enough, the survey was awaiting my attention. Most questions in the survey required answers provided on a scale of 1 through 10. The person who interacted with me didn't deserve a score of less than 5 but for some scores I went as high as 6 (because she put up with my jokes).

I wished that I could have provided comments to clarify my scores. The representative acknowledged me as soon as I came through the doors, both times, but I had to wait a couple of minutes before being served, which was fine. I wasn't ignored.

She was neither surly nor cheerful with me, though she did smile or laugh when I said something funny. In other words, she was a fellow human, doing her job exactly as the situation demanded. And I respect that.

I like how every time I drop off my Niro, there are no hidden costs or surprises. The car gets five stars for being solid, well-built, and reliable. But those aspects aren't taken into consideration in the survey.

Our Niro, in tip-top form, ready for adventure.

There is one thing that I've noticed in the last three times that I've taken the car in for service. One question asks if the car is returned to me a) better than I left it, b) the same as I left it, or c) worse than I've left it. I've always answered b, but when I start the car, I'm met with the warning message that I'm due for a maintenance check.

The message is never reset by whoever services the vehicle. I always have to do it, myself.

It's a small matter and very easy to do, but if anything less than perfect is a failure, that one little action is less than perfect.

I don't know what would constitute a perfect score. Do I just grade 10s across the board so that the corporate bean counters can feel good? It seems so contrived, and anything more than an average score for expected service seems like a lie to me.

What do you think? Should I have given the service folks a perfect score? How to you rate service departments in surveys? Leave a comment.

This may be the last survey that I fill out from Kia, unless I'm left dissatisfied after the experience or feel that my visit was memorable. And if I receive a reminder call from the service manager, I will respectfully explain why I feel such surveys don't mean much if they have to be pumped up for average, expected service.

Unless I leave the dealership thinking, wow, I did not expect that kind of service—good or bad—they can expect no feedback from me. No news is good news, right?