GM Seeks to Improve Satisfaction and Loyalty Among Consumers

Consumers who call General Motors with complaints aren’t going to be taken lightly.
It’s all part of GM’s new commitment to puting on a friendlier face for all of the people who use their products. To prove they mean business, GM has already put someone in charge of boosting vehicle quality and improving consumer satisfaction.

Alicia Boler-Davis, age 44, is the one who has been charged with leading GM’s big consumer satisfaction push. GM strongly believes it can increase its sales by improving consumer satisfaction.

Before giving Boler-Davis this job, GM divided customer care and quality responsibilities between many people. Not only that, but these people would then have to report to senior executives. Now, however, GM says that these two categories are way too important to be spread out between so many people. That is why they have combined them all under one person. That being said, Boler-Davis still has to report to someone, and that someone is Chief Executive Dan Akerson.

Ever since GM came out of bankruptcy in 2009, Akerson has been working hard to change his company’s bad reputation on both customer care and vehicle quality. It seems that GM now wants to put the consumer first, which it should do since taxpayers were responsible for bailing it out of $49.5 billion in debt.

The general director of GM’s customer call center, Jim Moloney, said that Boler-Davis is extremely street smart. She has built cars, and she is not afraid to be taken off the factory floor to hold meetings with Akerson. She is the prefect person for the job.

Of course, do not let GM fool people into thinking this is all for consumers. After all, it is also about the money. Simply increasing its customer loyalty rate by one percent is worth nearly $700 million in annual revenue. Right now, GM’s loyalty rate is only at 52 percent. It hopes to increase this to 60 percent, which will increase revenue by some $5 billion.

To increase consumer loyalty, GM needs to erase all memories of the bailout. It has to make consumers feel comfortable about buying GM vehicles again. To do that, however, the company has to change its bad reputation in terms of quality and customer service. After all, it was these problems that put GM in such deep debt in the beginning. Boler-Davis has already attempted to change the way GM handles its call center. She is doing this by bringing employees back in-house to run it. This is a move that will cost more money, but it is a move that GM feels is worth it if it will improve consumer loyalty.

David Sargent, J.D. Power and Associates’ vice president of vehicle research in the Global Automotive Operations Division, said that Boler-Davis has given pretty clear instructions to what she wants done. As one would want from someone in her position, she really enjoys getting good news, but she is more interested in what the bad news is.