Kia's Customer Service Focus - Putting On The Ritz

LONDON – Aug 1, 2013: When it comes to quality and customer service, Kia is all ears. Even the company’s top man is willing to take advice, while one of the world’s leading hotel chains is helping dealers improve the way they treat buyers.

Just as designers use boat shows, furniture exhibitions and fashion parades as inspiration for future models, so Kia’s customer-facing staff and quality inspectors are happy to use outside expertise.

In Korea, Kia enlisted the help of the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain in 2011 to develop customer service programmes, including a training manual for sales and service staff. It has recently been expanded to include sales promotion and marketing.

Meanwhile, at corporate HQ in Seoul, Vice-chairman and CEO Hyoung-Keun Lee subjects himself, the company’s upper management and heads of product development and manufacturing to a monthly grilling to address quality issues.

Putting on the Ritz-Carlton
The Ritz-Carlton Kia training programme is currently available only in Korea, but as both brands are global – the hotel chain has 81 properties in 26 countries while Kia operates in more than 170 markets ¬¬– there is no reason why it could not be extended if individual countries think it could help. Ritz-Carlton has twice won the prestigious Malcolm Bainbrige award, an American barometer of business excellence given by the President.

Last year 87 Kia sales offices were declared customer contact points of excellence, while almost 19,500 dealership employees, more than 100 staff members from service partners and 9,600 new recruits were given customer service training based on Ritz-Carlton guidelines.

Room with a view
Meanwhile Kia’s quality control meetings take place in the same room at Head Office that has been used since 1999. The aim is simple: to ensure that as Kia continues to expand sales around the world, it does not lose focus on quality and consistency.

It is this kind of self-examination which gave Kia the confidence to introduce its seven-year, 100,000-mile warranty to coincide with the European introduction of the first-generation cee’d in 2006 – a unique-in-Europe guarantee which has since been extended to cover the entire Kia range.

The monthly meeting is a pivotal feature of Kia’s product development, promoting inter-departmental co-operation on quality. At the company’s technology centre, pilot cars are put through the same build process as production models so that any potential quality issues can be detected at an early stage. Then the product development centre takes over, analysing not only Kia’s technical standards but also the cause of competitor recalls to ensure these can be avoided. Finally there is the global quality room, which operates around the clock to deal with any quality issues within 24 hours of being informed.

This attention to detail has resulted in the Sportage gaining top score among 118 cars in the UK’s J D Power Ownership Satisfaction Study and Auto Bild’s SUV of the year in Germany. Kia was also named Best Car Manufacturer in the 2012 Which? awards in the UK. But at Kia, such accolades, while extremely welcome, are also reminders of the need for consistent vigilance over quality.