General Motors ignition switch recall crisis was the result of certain employees within the company not taking early customer complaints to heart and alerting top management. As a result, the automaker is looking for new, proactive ways to discover customer complaints, and that includes taking to social media.
Many automakers only use official complaints filed by customers with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to discover potential defects in their vehicles. GM told Automotive News it has people monitoring social media 24 hours a day, scouring Twitter and automotive forums to bring vehicle issues to light.
“We have to identify issues before they become a problem,” GM president Dan Ammann told AN.
The same proactive nature was in force when Chevrolet swiftly responded to the negative tweets about Rikk Wilde’s presentation of the Colorado during the World Series post game coverage. They turned a negative situation into a positive one, embracing the humor behind the awkward speech and pushing the #technologyandstuff hashtag.
Amman and CEO Mary Barra have also taken new approaches to get customer feedback. They’ve started calling customers personally to hear their complaints, criticisms , or compliments in regards to the company’s or their vehicle’s performance.
“We have to take advantage of every data source that we have,” Ammann added.
Comments
Come on. You guys do good work for the most part, but this little fluff piece should have never seen the light of day, Not only is there no substance to the article–if you can call “GM told Automotive News…” and a couple of quotes an article–but it’s entirely inaccurate. Employees knew the ignition switch posed problems BEFORE it was even produced. And, if reports I’ve read are accurate, the switch was designed the way it was to meet the demands of top management.