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GM Customer Engagement Center Sees Double The Amount Of Traffic Since Recall

General Motors said the number of incoming calls to its Customer Engagement Center in Warren, Michigan have more than doubled during peak operating hours since the recall of 1.6 million of its small cars last month, according to a report from Bloomberg.

GM moved its call center operations to the Customer Engagement Center last year. Now, the center and its workers face a tough challenge as GM looks to deal with the recall. Senior vice president for global quality and customer experience, Alicia Bolder-Davis, posted a message on GM’s Fastlane blog in regards to the efforts to assist affected customers with the Engagement Center.

“Since GM announced the ignition switch recall, the center has seen more than double the amount of calls during peak times from typical daily call volumes,” Boler-Davis wrote. “Up to 100 dedicated, specially trained advisors have been available to quickly assist customers with questions on this issue alone, bringing down the average wait time to less than a minute.”

CEO Mary Barra will go before the U.S. House and Senate committee on April 2 to face questioning in regards to why it took so long for the automaker to recall the vehicles, when it had potentially known about the faulty ignition switch since as early as 2001. The Department of Justice and the NHTSA are also investigating the matter.

Sam loves to write and has a passion for auto racing, karting and performance driving of all types.

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Comments

  1. So sad to read about all those deaths with affected models and their families who thought simply that the person fell asleep while driving… now they must reconsidered this issue as being the cause.

    Reply
  2. While any death is tragic and sad I would not over react here.

    We do not have the details on these deaths but some of them while initiated by the failed ignition may also have resulted in human error in reacting poorly to it. Generally a car cutting out is not a recipe for instant death.

    Now in some cases It happening at the wrong place and wrong time could tragic. But in most cases it is a simple either hit neutral and restart of just pull it over and stop.

    Cars stall daily and often for many reason other than a bad ignition. They can fail due to other part failures or even poor maintenance. God Knows I have picked up many a customers car and had it stall repeatedly while getting it to where I could repair it.

    I suspect with so few deaths over so many cars over 14 years in service the number reflects more of the issues happening at a bad time with a bad reaction. This does not excuse GM but more wrong place wrong time for this to happen leading to the deaths.

    While some think the steering is locking I do not see this happening as even in off and lock mode as long as the key is in the ignition the column will not lock. Also the wheel will not lock till the wheel is turn 3/4 to 1 full tune to protect the drive if the key is remove so they can get to the side of the road.

    There is a lot more to this than many people thing or realize.

    There have been cars with failures that are much more tragic and lead to many more deaths per cars built but the media has chosen not to focus as much on them. We only heard a little on the Crown Vic fires and there were many more deaths due to fire from ruptured tanks.

    Even on the list cars with the most deaths per million units built Nissan has two higher than the Cobalt even counting all deaths involving the cars. the 350Z is number one on the list and even is sold in smaller numbers so the ratio of potential deaths goes down vs. models sold in greater numbers. In the case of this car it has several factors that hurt it but you hear nothing on it.

    Either way I am please GM is working to fix the issues with their reporting and how they deal with things vs. what Toyota did and how Chrysler flat refused to do anything about the fuel tanks in the jeeps till much later on. Old GM very much would have done similar.

    Reply

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