How To Lose Customer Brand Loyalty … a Story of BMW Service Failure

I consider myself an extremely loyal BMW customer, having owned nothing but BMW products for almost 20 years. In the last week, I had my worst BMW service customer experience in those 20 years. It has put a serious dent in my customer brand loyalty.

One negative service experience to lose a customer’s brand loyalty, you say? Not so, one trip to a service department, resulting in 8 different issues. Let me explain:

I took my car to a central Florida dealership to have a nagging squeal noise from under the hood investigated on an 18-month-old Series 1. Although I have never purchased a vehicle from this dealer, I have used them for service on numerous occasions over the last 8–9 years.

Here is a summary of my resulting issues:

1. I was refused an offer of a substitute car during the service of my vehicle, although the dealership is 30 miles from my home while. The reason? Never bought a car from them, though I have owned nothing but BMWs for 20 years, all purchased new. Note that this service has been previously granted on several occasions by this dealer.

2. The first problem they discovered was an inability to reset the oil service light, after my oil service. They claimed the fault was caused by a chaffed wire caused by animal…