Page 164 - Toyota Under Fire

RESPONSE AND THE ROAD TO RECOVER Y

of his Toyota dealerships made a profit every month in 2010, even
during the worst of the crisis, as a result of these steps by Toyota.

Stepping Up at Toyota’s Call Center
Dealers weren’t the only ones who were facing a flood of customer
calls and concerns. At the TMS call center in Torrance, California—
where the calls to Toyota’s customer service 800 number are
received—daily call volume went overnight from 3,000 calls per
day to 96,000 calls per day after the sticky pedal recall was an-
nounced, and they stayed at that level for a week. The following
week, there were still 50,000 calls per day coming in. As Nancy
Fein, vice president of customer relations, describes, calling it a
difficult situation to manage through is an understatement:

It was a very tough time with our customers, because
our customers had periods where they didn’t trust us, or
they felt like we were lying to them, or they felt that we
were misrepresenting ourselves. Being in customer rela-
tions, that means that we had a really difficult role of
not just taking care of an individual customer problem
with the vehicle, but needing to rebuild our customer’s
trust. We needed to fix our customers’ problems, and we
needed to help them have belief, and have confidence in
Toyota, the way we have confidence in Toyota.

The TMS call center was perhaps the first place where the
Toyota Way began having a major impact on turning the tide.
How does a call center manage a 30-fold increase in call volume
in 24 hours? The first step that Fein took was to recall everyone in
the TMS offices in California who had ever worked in the call

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