ttweed said:
... have admitted "the mistake," and they went "above and beyond" to make it right in my case. ...
TT
I think you showed a commendable diligence in pursuing the order SNAFU issue, with great results for yourself personally, and probably some improvement in Nissan efforts overall.
But isn't the " admitted "the mistake" " strictly a verbal admission to you alone on the phone?
I'm a recent fan of Nissan. Have owned a Nissan Altima since 2009 and it is far superior to the alternative mid-size vehicles offered by GM, Ford, and Toyota.
Nissan is to be highly commended for having done a huge amount right on the Leaf roll-out.
More than most companies have in the past on new product introductions.
Especially when selling a whole new idea and concept on transportation that most of the US market is completely ignorant about or at the very least hesitant about.
The direct to the customer approach may have had its flaws, but it is much better than the alternative.
But from a customer relations standpoint, I believe they have made a huge mistake in not acknowledging the details of the order SNAFU and apologizing to the customers.
Its not a contractual thing, as there was not a contractual commitment.
But there were statements of intent. And it is a matter of striving to maintain customer trust. When things happen that prevent those intentions from being carried out, the best result on customer trust can only be achieved by open communication that the original intent won't be carried out.
Nissan set out to build the world's first affordable mass produced vehicle. They did a lot to sell that fact, every positive aspect about it.
But waited to tell the customer much of anything about the unknowns and risks until presenting a contractual 3-4 page document at the final point of placing an order. Not very trust worthy to sell all the positives, and reveal all the negatives at the final point of ordering.
Nissan set out to deliver a lot of Leafs to the US by the end of December. Plans changed when they had to reallocate most production to Japan due to the tax incentives expiration and their inability to manufacture enough to deliver to the Japan market and meet their original intent on delivery to the US market. They apparently decided that sufficient communication was an E-mail stating delivery 4-7 months after order.
That's fairly opaque transparency that doesn't inspire much customer trust, at least not in a globally connected world in which customers communicate via forums such as MNL.
And on the order SNAFU, they appear to have decided that saying nothing to most customers, and providing some limited verbal acknowledgement to a few vociferous customers is sufficient.
They may be in a lose lose situation, they look bad no matter what they do on the order SNAFU.
They or a subcontractor made a bad mistake which violated everything about their original statement of intent.
They apparently decided that orders already in their vehicle manufacturing process would have to stay as is. Might have been a customer order in third week in January that proceeded into the manufacturing order system two weeks later (multiple months ahead of the initial customer orders that failed to be processed into the manufacturing order system). But too late to fix that, just get the customer orders back on track into the manufacturing order system.
But they did not communicate anything. In an interconnected world, lack of communication once a mistake is discovered is a bad choice.
I still have hopes they will learn to communicate and restore some of my trust. But the three things I've outlined don't make them look very trust worthy. But there's always a chance they will change.
