Is it best to keep your car within the brand’s workshops come service time, or are you better off taking your business elsewhere? We look at the nuts and bolts of the subject
Claire Evans claire.evans@haymarket.com
THE UK’S CAR service and repair industry is very big business, with consumers spending billions on maintaining their cars each year. It’s important, then, that the garages and service departments that motorists visit provide a high level of customer care.
While many service departments look after customers well and provide a high level of workmanship at a reasonable price, not all of them fulfil all of these criteria. If you visit a garage and receive poor communication, shoddy workmanship and high prices, you’ e likely to feel dissatisfied, making you disinclined to give them your business again.
So, to help you choose the best place to service your car, we asked nearly 25,000 people to tell us about their car maintenance experiences, as part of the annual What Car? Reliability Survey. The 19,317 respondents who said they had taken their car for servicing in the past 24 months were asked to rate the politeness of the garage staff, the quality of work done and the value for money offered.
We’ve collated the scores for these three areas to provide an overall customer satisfaction rating for up to 31 different brands of car. Most new car buyers stick with franchised dealer service departments for the first few years of ownership before switching to independent garages later, for reasons that include value and proximity to home. With this in mind, we’ve rated independents and franchises for satisfaction according to owners of cars aged up to five years old, to reveal which is better at keeping customers happy.
By the time cars reach six or seven years of age, the majority are taken to independent garages, and within this category owners can choose either a workshop that specialises in cars from a specific brand or one that makes no distinction between marques. To find out whether the non-specialist or specialist workshops are better thought of, we’ve compared car owners’ satisfaction ratings for the two types of garage.
The resulting data should give you a good idea of the best places for servicing – from your car being new to its 20th birthday.
Franchised dealers versus independent garages (cars up to five years old)
Franchised dealer service departments
Lexus has the best franchised service network when it comes to customer satisfaction, with the highest scores for attitude and quality of work, but Kia isn’t far behind, with its score boosted by an
