https://jalopnik.com/spying-on-emplo...5438qkl25CUKIM
Parts arriving broken or weeks late. Horrible customer service. An office where employees were spied on with cameras. These are just a few complaints from former employees and from hundreds of car enthusiasts who have done business with major Euro auto parts supplier ECS Tuning. With the company having recently bought another giant in the industry, Pelican Parts, an entire car community now worries that it’ll be forced to contend with a dysfunctional retailer just to keep vehicles on the road.
“ECS is the Comcast of German car parts,” a post by a member named Logan Carey reads on the 5,800 member-strong Facebook page titled “Why I Hate ECS Tuning.” With 136,000 Instagram followers, ECS is a big name in the European car community, especially online. But as much as the internet has helped ECS expand, so, too, has it bitten back.
The Comcast comparison is just one of many posts written by apparent ECS customers displeased with the company, which opened its doors in 1962 as a small Volkswagen service garage called Euro-Car Service in Norton, Ohio, in the outskirts of Akron.
But ECS is no longer a “mom and pop” operation, having expanded over the past two decades into an online shop with more than 1.3 million parts for sale. This rapid expansion, some ECS customers believe, has brought with it a degradation in customer service, and now—especially after the company bought popular Massachusetts-based BMW parts retailer Turner Motorsport in 2015 and laid off much of its workforce—BMW, VW, Mercedes, Audi and Porsche owners around the world are concerned about the fate of California-based Euro car parts giant Pelican Parts, which ECS bought last fall.
While ECS says it’s been making significant changes lately—especially after the Facebook group went viral—the company admits that many of the problems mentioned on the page are real, with the CEO Imran Jooma telling me “We have not been consistent with the level of service we provide,” and the company’s BMW brand manager saying, “Generally, what people say is accurate.”
That latter quote is particularly surprising, because people are saying a lot, providing an interesting look into what happens in 2018 when a car parts company pisses off thousands of meme-wielding users.
Jalopnik first heard about “Why I Hate ECS Tuning” when readers directed us to a July 1 post by Daniel Curtis, former director of operations at Turner Motorsport.
Shared across a number of car forums, the post that sent “Why I Hate ECS Tuning” membership sky high is a scathing criticism of ECS’s purchase of Turner Motorsport from someone who worked at the latter company for nine years, and who claims that ECS promised Turner “amazing synergies and upsides” before dismantling it. Curtis writes:
They were insufferable, right out of the gate. I played along for a few months, as they made one foolish or unimaginable decision after another. As the Director of Operations, I had a bird’s eye view of the deconstruction and dismemberment of a once great company.
Curtis’ post goes on to call the treatment of ECS employees “inhumane,” saying there were cameras at every desk monitoring everything they did.
Plus, rooms were allegedly key-coded, severely limiting employee access throughout the building. Curtis’ blistering remarks continue, describing the chaotic operations in the warehouse:
I felt almost as bad for their customers. Their warehouse was a disorganized hive of slave-like labor, governed by fear and intimidation. Their shipments were POORLY packaged, their process riddled with opportunities for mistakes and human error, and the morale of their employees those the lowest I’ve ever seen.
Curtis—who, it’s worth noting, now works at a competing operation—then describes the plight of Turner Motorsport as ECS worked to consolidate the two companies’ operations, offering buyouts to most Turner employees. This meant, according to Curtis, eliminating Turner’s R&D and production department, and keeping just four sales reps and two customer service agents to represent the Turner brand.
“A once-great all-BMW parts house went from 50 employees to six, remains to this very today,” he concludes. Curtis says he quit the company exactly nine years after he started.
Curtis’ post was shared far and wide, not just on Facebook, but on popular automotive forums like Grassroots Motorsports, VWVortex and M3forum. “Why I Hate ECS Tuning” membership, as shown by the above graph, skyrocketed.
The group’s founder, Josh Wright—an Oregonian and long-time Euro car fan who started the group after reading many ECS complaints on VW and Audi forums—told me the group went from 400 members to 3,000 in just a couple of days.
Complaints Show ECS Has Been Making Mistakes For Years
Upon reading Curtis’ post, ECS customers and former employees came out of the woodwork, all posting their experiences on the Facebook page in screeds, complaints, and in as many memes as possible.
One admin compiled a huge list of “alternatives to ECS, Turner, Pelican” based on member input. Everyone was trying to keep away, either for fear of a bad order or out of spite, or both.
For many, “Why I Hate ECS Tuning” has been a way to finally get back at a company that they feel has underserved and ignored them for years. While some apparent former employees have echoed Curtis’ criticisms of the workplace, the majority of complaints deal with shipping, inventory management and customer service.
And while these may sound like standard issues you’d find in any Amazon reviews section, the problems seem widespread, and indicate major dysfunction in a company that is now—especially after picking up Turner Motorsport a few years ago and Pelican Parts last fall—one of the biggest players in the European aftermarket car parts industry. It’s a major source that enthusiasts use to get the components they need to make their cars unique, or to keep them running.
Parts would show up late or broken. One guy’s fan shroud arrived snapped twice in a row, sent out with not nearly enough packaging material in the box. Orders would show up with one new part and one old, already-busted one. Thousands of dollars of parts, supposedly in stock meant to go out in a matter of days, took months to arrive.
Matthew Litke, an admin for the Facebook group, referred me to this post about wait-times for “in stock “parts:
ECS even managed to piss off its most loyal local customers, no longer allowing them to pick up items at the company’s warehouse, instead requiring parts to be shipped.
“To ship a single [$2] lugbolt 15 miles down the road, it was $7,” Litke told me over the phone. Another member mentioned the convoluted one-week-long travel path his $14 shipment took to travel 50 miles from the warehouse: “Wadsworth, to Columbus, to Detroit, to Cleveland, to my local Post Office,” he said, criticizing Fedex Smartpost.
Customer service was a generous term. One charming Facebook post from Natalie Jewels details how her package shipped only a couple of weeks late, but arrived with half the taillights she had ordered.
“Lo and behold, I open the box and they only sent me the inner tail lights and the four harnesses,” Jewels’ post reads. “I’m missing both outer lights.” Things went south from there. She says she called ECS and was told by a giggling customer service rep that the left outer light was out of stock, and that her options were to either wait all the way until September, or to order a different brand. The rest of Jewel’s post gets understandably heated:
continued on link..... (article is too long to keep posting)
https://jalopnik.com/spying-on-emplo...5438qkl25CUKIM
Originally Posted by elscotto80
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