Should Women-friendly garages be run by women?

Would garages be any better if they had more women in them to sort out the customer service side of things? It’s a thought… Based on everyday feedback from women drivers, we know that the motor industry has many genuinely good garages, but sadly there are quite a few bad ones out there too.

Inevitably, the motor industry doesn’t air its dirty washing in public and whilst the complaints continue about garages and used cars, nobody seems willing to ‘out’ the bad garages and the unscrupulous dealers we all read about (or only use once). In our experience, the regulatory bodies lack the teeth to do the job here. Nice and understanding as they always seem to be, they will not name and shame offenders for ‘legal reasons’ they say. So the customer is expected to take the bad garage or dealer to Court and we suspect that few women do this in the end because it’s complicated, they’re often fed a load of lies by the business about the likely outcome and they worry it could end up costing them even more. FOXY’s approach is different when it comes to problems that women drivers experience.

We run a helpdesk for members so they know to come to us for the advantage of our practical advice. This can be important when it’s a technical matter and there’s a need to know or understand the jargon. Having given our independent opinion we then support the member to get things resolved. If it involves a female friendly approved FOXY Choice subscriber (yes it has been known…) it’s usually a case of our giving them a nudge, their resolving the problem quickly & amicably with us all learning from the experience. Where the lady driver is a non-member and FOXY doesn’t know the garage or dealer, we’ll help to check out their credentials so she knows if the garage is part of a trade organisation or complaints resolution service. She usually joins the Club at that stage, to be sure it doesn’t happen again. Where there is no evidence of ANY commitment to quality and the garage doesn’t have a website, it’s hard to understand why any female motorist would buy from them in the first place. The reason this happens is because it is reasonable for motorists to expect garages to be licensed (they aren’t) and mechanics to be qualified (which they don’t have to be). So they trust a garage because they can’t imagine a garage wouldn’t be licensed or their staff unqualified.

In a nutshell, few motorists realise the risk they run, choosing a garage on the basis of price too many times, but without doing any homework first. Sadly there is no one independent body above all others (that would be called regulation, which FOXY would welcome tomorrow) to either explain and rate the many competing quality schemes or check if the garage is actually a member of the scheme it claims to be. Our experience is that many garages tick quality boxes when they apply to join our female friendly approved garage network not realising we’ll check this; we don’t list quality logos until we can prove eligibility.

Sadly I can’t see this situation getting any better, because the many competing good garage schemes are merely adding to the total confusion in motorists’ minds. Our approach is to give offending garages and dealers the benefit of the doubt for a reasonable period of time to sort things out. If they don’t show any interest in doing this, we then spread the word among women drivers within the Club. Few garages and used car showrooms like to think of local foxy ladies hearing of their unscrupulous antics so it’s that sort of subtle approach that means FOXY usually get things sorted out in the end.
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Added: 03 November 2011

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