GM engineers take retail road trips

DETROIT -- At Rick Hendrick Chevrolet near Atlanta, service technician Patrick Kemper was flummoxed last week by what should have been a quick and easy job: replacing a burned-out headlamp on a 2011 Malibu.

But the car's design doesn't allow for easy access inside the headlight module, requiring the removal of the whole front fascia and stretching the repair time to about an hour.

"From a customer satisfaction standpoint, I have a hard time charging someone $125 in labor to change a $30 bulb," Kemper says. "It would have been nice if the engineers had given us a little more access" to the bulb.

Luckily for Kemper, he got to deliver that message in person to a pair of GM engineers who were visiting his service department last week. They were among about 90 engineers from GM's engineering hub in suburban Detroit who are getting a six-week crash course on the retail end of GM's business, visiting around 20 dealerships in major markets from Los Angeles to Orlando.

Engineers have been chatting with service managers about how they diagnose problems and deal with snags such as the Malibu headlight. They're shadowing salespeople in showrooms and chatting up customers about what they like and don't like. They're even visiting non-GM stores to size up the competition.

The idea is to give the people who develop GM's vehicles -- engineers who rarely venture far from GM's technical center and proving grounds near here -- a view from the front lines and have them funnel their learning and impressions back to headquarters. GM executives hope the engineers will view future vehicle-development decisions more through customers' eyes, and that it rubs off on their peers.

"Whether it's service problems or just customers who don't know how something works, these engineers will see our vehicles in the real world and be able to channel that back into their work," GM North America President Mark Reuss said in an interview. "They'll appreciate how hard and involved the sales and service process is on the ground."

The program is part of a broader push by GM to improve quality and customer satisfaction. For instance, GM has hired specialists from Apple and other tech companies to help dealerships solve customers' infotainment headaches. Last year, GM added a customer-retention metric to its bonus structure for salaried employees in North America. And it appointed a customer experience chief, Alicia Boler-Davis, to monitor customer tastes and demands. GM also made her head of product quality as a way to get the customer's voice heard earlier.

GM claims to be the only major automaker to consolidate the quality and customer experience roles.

The training program is another in a long line of efforts by GM to try to break down barriers between its divisions and regional operations, and ease the bureaucracy that GM executives have said led to a lack of focus on the customer. Many current and former executives have pointed to the company's historical complexity and infighting as a factor in its 2009 bankruptcy.

Since taking over as CEO in 2010, Dan Akerson has pushed his management team to make GM's web of offices, labs and factories work like a more integrated global company. Until now, though, that effort has not extended much to the dealer network.

"It's almost like the telephone game, where you're trying to understand what the customer or the dealer wants, but there are all of these levels in between us and them," says Sarah Cohen, an engineer who oversees test facilities at GM's proving grounds in Milford, Mich., and visited the Hendrick store last week. "This experience gets rid of all of those levels."

Engineers selected for the training program are from a cross section of GM's U.S. engineering ranks, including up-and-coming rank-and-filers to upper-level managers. Thirty of them, including Cohen, are among a first wave that has rotated through stores in California, the New York area and Atlanta. Cohen's group includes an engineer who handled the exterior lighting on the recently launched Chevrolet Impala, another who conducts battery testing on the Chevy Volt and a vehicle system engineer on the Cadillac XTS.

Cohen, who manages test labs where GM engineers seek to eradicate squeaks and rattles and other imperfections before vehicles are shipped, said it has been helpful to see how dealership service techs in the field pinpoint trouble spots.

Cohen talked with one customer about her frustration with being unable to achieve the same fuel economy on her vehicle that the EPA rating says it should get. It prompted Cohen to deliver to some dealerships a backgrounder memo from an engineer in Detroit who specializes in fuel efficiency, explaining how driving patterns and other factors can affect mpg.

"The dealers are getting these questions every day," Cohen says. "Now at least you can walk through with them some of the reasons why they might be losing fuel economy."

When their training is complete, at least some of the engineers will be expected to brief a panel of GM executives that likely will include Reuss, GM product chief Mary Barra and GM engineering head John Calabrese, a GM spokesman said.

One observation that Cohen plans to pass along: Negative perceptions of GM vehicles in California, New York and other places -- markets where GM's sales historically have lagged -- are stuck in the past. She says that will provide plenty of motivation for her when she returns to GM's vehicle proving grounds.