The Chrysler Five Star Dealer Quality Program

For years, Chrysler ran a program which assigned stars to dealers based on the results of customer surveys. This program had many problems, not the least of which being that the dealers only got numbers, not advice on how to improve their results.

In 1998, Chrysler began its new and revised Five Star program. A full description of it is in this Quality Digest cover story, but the essence of the program is that dealers must:

call every customer, including both car buyers and those coming for service, to get their feedback.
survey their own employees on a regular basis.
do something with the information they get from customers and employees.
continue to maintain high survey ratings.
provide specified levels of training to their employees.
keep the physical grounds up to standards

In theory, this program should be extremely powerful. In reality, it is hard to judge. Five Star dealers get higher customer ratings than other dealers, but that's hardly surprising, since the best dealers would be most likely to try for the program; and since one requirement of the program is high customer ratings.

From the people we have spoken with, there is both good and bad in the system. The good part is that dealers have been give some tools to work with, in terms of training, employee survey information, and customer feedback. These tools are invaluable for dealers who really do want to do a better job. On the darker side, those who don't care about the program stand a decent chance of getting certified anyway, depending on their zone reps. Though Chrysler reps told that there is a safeguard in the system, in that dealerships are continuously recertified (and can easily be decertified) by rotating zone office personnel, other industry observers have expressed concerns that no outside agency is involved. Ford, for example, will use J.D. Power to certify dealers for their Blue Oval program, which as near as we can tell is similar to the old Five Star system except with lower standards and much stronger financial incentives. Ford's program is crippled, though, by having standards so low most dealers qualified when it was started.

Employees can be under a lot of pressure to get survey ratings up, as indeed they always have been. (There is more pressure now because there are more rewards for certification). Many of the issues which annoy customers, though, are not under their control. In addition, mechanics are still under a great deal of pressure to push jobs through quickly, and not waste time talking to each other, sharing lessons learned, and generally increasing their effectiveness. Indeed, the desire to get customers' cars back on time may exacerbate existing "fix-it-fast" problems, though the program's emphasis seems to be on "fix it right the first time."

Being a five star dealer is no guarantee. The best systems have problems, and even with outside certification, some dealers can "game the system" and pretend to be doing everything they are supposed to do. It's hard to get around that.

The key advantages of the new system are the way it provides dealers who care with training and tools to improve the way they do business; and the possibility that, given the need to get information from customers and employees, even dealers who don't care may be pushed to action. That makes it a far better method than the old "improve your numbers" game.

In any case, if customers have their cars actually fixed correctly the first time they go to a dealer, and feel that they are treated well, it will do wonders for Chrysler's reputation for quality. Not that many will give Chrysler credit for that, any more than Chrysler gets credit for its much-improved J.D. Power showings; that's "because of Mercedes." Oh, well. You and I know better.