VW's reputation in Malaysia

Volkswagen did a great job in the last few years promoting its cars and its brand. Their market share increased significantly over the years and is the top selling German car brand in Malaysia. With the growth it naturally sounds good but the problem came when they did not put much emphasis on after sales. With more cars sold the number of problems also grew. Many were the lower powered engined cars with the dry clutch DSG transmission.

Of late Facebook has been the place where disgruntled owners have vented their frustration about the lack of support and service by VW centres. The cars are all sold with 5 years warranty with the warranty made up of 2 years manufacturer's warranty and the balance of the 3 years supported by Allianz insurance. The problems came when the owners made claims after 2 years of ownership and Allianz would drag their feet to honor the claims. There are also cases where the VW warranty is not honored when the customer supposedly missed the service or was late to service their car by 300km which in our opinion is ridiculous considering that scheduling a service will take 2 weeks and to tell the owner not to drive their car for 2 weeks fearing that their warranty will be void once the buffer mileage will be exceeded.
To makes matters worse the customer service crew at many of the VW service centers were not adequately trained to handle unhappy customers.

It appears that in the attempt to go for large volume sales VW has compromised on its quality and attention to detail. The number of complaints is mounting every month giving VW a bad reputation. This is quite surprising considering the VW should have known about the problems with the cars and put more emphasis on service and support. Once a customer has had a bad experience with a brand, they will unlikely return to buy another. We all know that it is hard enough to win a customer, it is even harder to retain a loyal customer.

Looking at the present situation, if VW does not step up its customer support and provide better after sales service, their honeymoon period of good sales will come to an end soon.