This had to be a funny day. I just left my home this morning with my old car heading to the car dealer where I had to pick up my brand new car.

The brand of the car is not really relevant but it is important to say that is is one of the three biggest German manufacturer.

When I finished signing an infinite amount of paper we headed to the park where I could pick up the car…

Surprise!

The engine did not start at all. It was quite embarassing for the sales guy to see me sitting in the car trying to turn it on with no effect. He called the mechanical department to try figure out what was happening. After almost an hour I left the dealer with another car while they will try to fix the issue.

Actually I am a very calm guy and I understand that this can happen. I was actually very polite and I just said I was quite sad about what happened.

I came back to the office and I decided to write an email just to state how sad the experience was. I was thinking that it would have been quite simple to do that but I was wrong.

The first email I tried bounced back from the manufacturer corporate site, and the very same happened to the second email address I tried. I ended up making a phone call and wrote an email to the dealer customer care.

That was quite surprising to me.

If I had to give a couple of suggestions to the car manufacturer I would say:

• Check that the e-mail addresses on your web site are correct.
• Check that those email addresses are fully set up and working. Check again on a regular base (a very simple script would suffice).
• If your customers spent thousands of Euro on your products, please give them real people contact names and not something like carmanufacturer@carmanufacturer.com.
• Last but not least, try to turn the engine before the customer is in front of you.