Challenges and Opportunities
Service Needs "Cultural Change"
The treatment boat owners receive when seeking service will need to improve dramatically for the industry to retain current and attract new customers.
Boat owners, like most other consumer durable product owners, are comparing service treatment to that of auto dealerships and find it hardly measures up. Service is the number one area cited that needs improvement at boat dealerships. Almost one-third of recent buyers rated their last boat repair experience as "fair or poor.
The average repair takes two days—an amount of time which owners expect—but almost half of the repairs took four days or more. A majority of owners are baffled why needed parts aren't in stock to make quicker repairs. For comparison, at auto dealerships today, customers rate service experiences as satisfactory in the high-90 percentiles.
Members of the RPC recognize that this may be the most difficult area to improve because of the fragmented nature of industry supply and distribution systems. Even so, they suggest that service methods need to be carefully researched and defined from the customer perspective before solutions are advanced. Problems may be addressed by development of quality management standards for both manufacturers (i.e., correcting products deficiencies before service is needed) and retailers. RPC members also urged NMMA's Education Committee to examine the research with a focus on service to advance ideas and programs to address this challenge.
