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Protect yourself from lawsuits and Internet slander by disgruntled customers |
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Monday, 02 July 2007 |
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Page 2 of 3
How to thwart the ambitions of “the customer from hell”
Orso offered some advice to safeguard against a similar situation that happened to him. First and foremost, he said, remember that your true customer is the one who legally owns the vehicle and can legally sign your repair contract.
• Never proceed with a repair without having in your possession a repair contract signed and on file with the true owner... not with a son or daughter and not with the spouse or boyfriend if the vehicle is not in their name. Remember that the insurer slated to pay the bill is not your true customer. If you talk to the insurer at all, have a signed authorization from the vehicle owner permitting you to talk to the insurer.
• Photograph every inch of the vehicle to be repaired. Keep all parts invoices and specifications. Keep factory recommended procedures pages and follow the guidelines. Use a “Notice of Deficiency” to document any insurance refusals, short pays, and the like. Repair or document every inch of damage, old and new (the only saving grace we had in our struggle with this customer was a well documented file). Even though we had jumped through every hoop before commencing repairs, we were still not suit-proof… no business ever is suit-proof.
• Have all your paperwork in order on every repair, as if every repair you perform will be legally challenged, and make sure you have insurance on customer complaints to cover defense costs. Make sure you have identity-theft insurance. Most garage policies have not caught up to speed with Internet cyber-scammers. You will never be completely loss-protected, but you can greatly narrow your exposure by taking these precautions.
• Buy every domain name that your business name and personal name fits into. Purchase every ‘dot’, ‘net’, ‘dot biz’, ‘dot us’, ‘dot org’, … ‘dot anything’ that could have your personal or business name attached to it. Sites like www.godaddy.com have assistants who can help you. Also buy up the offshore domain suffixes such as ‘dot mobi’, ‘dot tv’, ‘dot ws’, and buy up web addresses with your name and shop name followed by words such as sucks, such as “joesbodyshopsucks.com.”
Search engines today will redirect your customers to a website you may not own and your name could be on them with a simple search engine prompt. Good advice is to monitor Google and Yahoo or assign someone within your organization to check search engines weekly to catch and manage damage control as soon as it happens.
Should you discover a cyber attack, instantly check www.whois.net to determine who is attacking you. It could be a competitor or an ex-employee with an axe to grind. “Who ever knew 10 years ago we would be fighting for the right to use our own name?” Orso said. “Ten years ago a friend in computer programming told me to buy every dot domain I could before some one else did. Unfortunately, I never thought that anyone would take my name and put up a site bashing me.”
• Trademark your name and/or your company name with the Federal Trademark Office. Internet law is Federal rather than State, so you have to go to Federal court to defend or pursue Internet cyber squatters. Those offshore ‘dots’ are International Law and you don’t want to go there. Federal Court by itself is a different and very expensive venue, and very few law firms know how to handle Internet law, forcing you to retain the services of expensive attorneys. Sooner or later even your best customer service practices will fail to satisfy certain customers. Every shop occasionally runs into an opportunist seeking money, revenge, or just a “pound of your flesh,” and the Internet is there to make it easy for them. Shops may also find themselves listed on an Internet gripe page or blog. If this happens there isn’t much you can do unless you have previously positioned yourself to not get tagged. There is no win against a customer and unless you follow these steps you have positioned yourself to lose. A good offense is always the best defense.
• Have all your paperwork in order and in total compliance with the laws of your state. The ultimate answer of some shops facing customer problems is to “buy back” the vehicle. But this practice could start you down a slippery slope to becoming a used car dealer. A better defense, as listed above, is to document, document, document. With many of the DRP contracts that shops have signed onto, shifting of liability, hold-harmless clauses, capping payments, and a multitude of other insurer-friendly policies contrary to good business practices ensure that DRP shops could be in for more of a ride in the future than that for which they bargained.
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