How to tackle backorders
After his opening column, Danny Wiggins, the author of Surviving the Parts Counter: A Real Guide for New Parts Advisors, returns to confront the topic of backorders and what customers find most annoying about them.
If there is one subject guaranteed to unite retail, technicians, service advisors, bodyshops and dealership management, it’s backorders. Everyone hates them. Customers may think the parts department is hiding the part. Technicians might think someone forgot to order it, and bodyshops may think nobody understands the urgency! Somewhere in the middle stands the parts advisor, staring at a computer screen showing exactly the same message it showed yesterday: No ETA.
Of course, the customer will still be ringing every day asking: “Where’s my part? Why’s it taking so long? Surely someone must have one?”
Modern parts systems can show stock across entire dealer networks and sometimes even overseas, and if every location says zero, there isn’t a secret shelf somewhere with your name on it. Sometimes, quite simply, someone has to manufacture the thing first. But that doesn’t stop the escalation process. Customer Assistance opens a special case. A reference number appears. Emails arrive announcing that the issue has been “escalated to the highest possible priority”. This sounds impressive until one realises that “highest possible priority” still doesn’t magically manufacture a control arm overnight.
Meanwhile, the pressure is building. The bodyshop is demanding answers.
The dealer turns to head office. Head office chases the manufacturer, and so on. But here’s the thing: the manufacturer isn’t necessarily sitting on a mountain of parts either.
Behind every backorder is a chain of manufacturers, suppliers, logistics companies, warehouses and dealerships, all trying to solve the same problem. That’s perhaps what we forget.
What’s the problem?
A backorder isn’t always someone failing to do their job. Sometimes it is simply the point where the modern automotive supply chain runs out of something we have all become accustomed to having instantly: the part.
And perhaps that’s the real frustration. We live in a world where we are capable of tracking a £4 parcel from a warehouse to our front door, watching its journey in real time from one depot to another, yet sometimes the answer to “where’s my part?” is: “It doesn’t exist right now! We’re waiting for someone to make it!”
And that’s the part most customers find hardest to understand.
