Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Terrible Experience with service in Pratham Motors, where next ?

Terrible Experience with service in Pratham Motors, where next ?

I own a 2006Dec model Swift vxi. I bought it from Pratham motors and have been servicing with them. I was pretty happy with their service. For a couple of years I was in Kolkata and since 2011 I am back in Bangalore. Couple of services with Pratham now and I have realized they are not the same Pratham anymore.

I had given my car for general servicing and I realized that the tyres are suddenly bald although my spare wheel has enough tread to it. With every servicing I used to ask them to rotate the tyres. My clutch was extremely stiff and being the single driver of this car I can very well make out the difference. Considering the fact that my car has driven 40K kms I went to the nearest Bridgestone shop and changed all the 4 wheels although I was not able to convince myself that I did not notice my tyre in such a bad condition before. The clutch was another thing which I failed to convince myself that it was a general wear and tear.

I escalated it to the manager (AGM) who came and tried to again explain the same thing that it was a usual wear and tear. I could just tell him that unfortunately I cannot prove it to although I am sure something is wrong at the service station. I also told him of an instance when the right headlight went fused and I had to change it. I went to the speed service location and a technician came and replaced it and asked me if I need the bill or not. Since I was in a hurry, I asked him to forget about the bill and next moment he got me a bulb and changed it. When I went to pay him, he asked me to sit inside the car to pay. I did not pay any heed at that time but later realized that someone just lost a proper bulb. On highlighting this to the manager, he started queuing up the service men in front of me to recognize the one. I was not able to recognize the one. I almost felt like being in a crime scene.

Recently I had a scratch on the car which I had described in one of the posts in the forum. I went there for repair and the manager came and met me asking if I was convinced with his explanations given previously. I still was not although I requested him and the service adviser to take care of the car this time.

To my surprise, this was the worst of all experiences.

One thing they are good is that they car get cleaned very nicely which makes you realize that you car was pampered a lot till you start looking at it closely.

1. The side beading had numerous scratches and they did not think of replacing it although I had called them to replace it. I placed the order of the team-bhp sticker also. Now if they replace it, they say, they will have to repaint it as taking it out and putting it back might result in aberrations. Net result, I am stuck with this.

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2. The door handles had to be replaced because of the accident. The newly fixed ones now do not close completely till you give it a budge.

3. The rear lamp still has coating of painting although they charged for removing and putting back the tail light assembly.

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4. There were scratches in the bumper and I had asked them to just do some brush painting so that I could fix it in one go later. What they did was un believable. I am no maestro in painting although I can vouch that I could do a better job. To top that, there is no match to the colors used. It's red, that's all. The white bit is a light reflection and the paint touch up is the blotch under it. I could not believe that the delivered it to me in this state.

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5. There were multiple mild scratches like some tool bag or something kept on the bonnet and then removed. I showed them to the service advisor and he managed to remove part of it using a rubbing compound and asked me to come later for the whole thing to be removed. But he could not answer how it happened.

6. My Pioneer AVH-P4000 DVD touch screen head has just one message on the screen, "Screen Image May Appear Reversed". I cannot do anything on the screen now. The screens or the display button is not responding. This is something that I faced in the previous service too as my car on receiving was on a local station which I never tuned to. So someone happily played with it.

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I am surprised that all this happened after I speak to the AGM who was supposed to ensure that this car is taken care of. I wonder how it would be otherwise. I got calls from them to come back and fix these issues although I seriously do not have the guts to take it back to some place where it is attended to so carelessly.

This post is 2 fold. One is to make the readers aware of how carelessly the cars are being taken care of in the service station. Two, where next. This is the first time I am thinking beyond these authorized dealer service station. I am ready to go anywhere in Bangalore where the car can be geuninely taken care of. I have a service due next month.

Any genuine pointers to a good service station for my Suzuki Swift will be highly appreciated. I was considering Carnation, but I read not so good reviews in the forum. How is Team Tech Auto off Sarjapur road ? That's the one that has the most recent reviews.

I saw some posts on this but there were very old to be concluding on a solution. Moreover I did also wanted to highlight the poor service provided by Pratham.

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