mnavarro

Actually I don't think their layout is bad, I just think that it's less to do with customer service than how the place is layed out. Sales is margin thin and gruppe-s has their sales staff behind the phone where I'm sure they do the bulk of their sales. It doesn't make sense to have somebody up front for the occasional walk in. A sign would easily rectify the problem.

RedStage

iTrader: (4)

It honestly sounds like your set up was screwed from the get go, you pass it off to a shop and then hold them accountable for everything that goes wrong.

As an owner I'd be doing a "pre-flight" walk around prior to driving my HIGHLY worked on car 600 miles.

Sounds like you don't know as much about cars as you say.

I always check my car before I take it off the lot.

UK n00b

iTrader: (3)

PM Sent.

Mike

scarface

iTrader: (3)

Mike is the man!!!!! He is one of the top rated tuners for subies in the nation. Of course everybody wants to go to him. I understand you had a bad experience but every shop has its moments. I have learned you have to be patient with Gruppe-S. They have so many customers because of the work they do. I admit the customer service isnt the greatest but Mike has always helped me out everytime i have gone there. Yeah he has told me we are too busy but at least he is being honest and not telling you oh we can do it and not get it done. They have a huge customer base and i think to make a million people happy and a few unhappy is pretty good. I mean your not going to make everybody happy no matter how hard you try. Im sorry you had a bad experience there. I guess they just gave you a bad first impression.

I have been trying to get Mike to tune my STi for i think two months now and i just got bumped to another day because they had parts come in and they couldnt take me. But thats ok because i know when i finally do go in to get tuned it will be well worth it. Just the price you pay for great suby minds. IMO

I have had many things installed by mike and yeah i have gotten rescheduled or bumped to another day because they where too busy.............but aint that the price you pay to get your car worked on by the subaru master?????? He is top notch subie guy and yes you are going to have to be very patient with him because he has a lot of other people to make happy too. I understand that now that i have been going there for almost two years now.

That does suck about your experience though. But like the previous post said you did take the car there after your engine had already been put through the ringer. Just my opinion, not trying to protect anybody just stating facts.

+1 for Gruppe-S

Eli

gruppe-s

iTrader: (22)

Matt,

After reading your post thoroughly I wanted to make sure a few items were posted here in this thread.

We were informed when we asked to undertake the task of Fixing an oil leak on the turbo, installing injectors and looking at the Idle air control on the manifold that the car was running but could not run due to the leak.

The car gets delivered to us and we immediately get the car onto a lift and try to fire her up, ok no power no big deal so we put on a jumper pack. Great now it cranks still not starting. After a little looking around we find that the car has no ECU. At this point I call you and you hit the roof on the phone and explain it should be in the car and you'll take care of it. 2 weeks pass I call you you tell me that you thought Andrew from Hydra had dropped it by. Finally 2 months later Mikitto comes by with your ECU.

We are now fairly busy so have to wait a while to get the car out of where we stored it and into the schedule to work on.

We touble shoot the oil leak on the turbo and find that someone installed a pipe thread block but used teflon and it was not sealing, we take care of this and no leak from the turbo.

We install the injectors and that goes fine.

I look at the Idle air, now here is the fun part. You have a DBW manifold with a drive by cable throttle body which is where the idle air resides (not the manifold) so the idle air stepper regulates the air over the throttle plate so as I informed you idle air was installed fine on your setup but needed to be controlled by the hydra (which is probably setup for a DBW throttle body in your case which has the Idle control build into the DBW settings not a seperate motor)

At no point did I say I couldn't tune the Hydra, when I called you on the phone informing you that our work was complete I stated quite clearly that the injectors needed to be scaled for the car to run right and you replied that was no problem you knew how to do that.

I stayed on the Saturday and helped you trouble shoot the breather that whoever did the original work covered with what looked to be the wrong coolant jacket I also ripped the plug out of another motor of ours and gave it to you for the breather.

Your right I did say it would be 2 weeks before we could allot the 4-6 hours it would take to tair everything down and replace the coolant jacket so we could get the right fitting in there and you stated it was no problem you would have the car collected by a friend on the Wednesday and could we store the car until then which we did.

I am sorry you feel the way you do over this whole ordeal and believe me we would be just as happy with it not happening as well based on if we had known the true state of the vehicle prior to it being dropped off we would never have accepted the work in the first place.

I would prefer to continue this offline Matt so I sent you a PM from my personal account and you can all me at anytime to discuss this.

Regards,

Mike

ucbsti

iTrader: (9)

Well, there are certainly 2 sides to every story.

And yeah, from what it sounds like, you sent the car to gruppe-s without fully understanding how messed up it truely was. You informed them of what was wrong, they fixed what you pointed out, and sent you on there way. No shop wants to spend hours upon hours of needle in a haystack type searching for other shops botched work

As for the customer service thing, yeah, sometimes its lacking, but you will see that from any place that has the volume of customers that gruppe-s does

Forced

iTrader: (7)

so is LIC the only shop around here without a complaint thread recently?

Yes, the customer service is horrible everytime ive called or been there. you feel unwanted sitting in the waiting room. it has made me never want to go there again.

but...mike is supposed to be a great tuner and i have read all about how he goes out of his way to help people on the clock and off the clock.

theres a trade off, but should there be?

DanyoCantDrift

iTrader: (9)

was this the gc8 couple saturdays ago that you were helping work on that was puffing out black smoke and was replacing the coolant or whatevers infront of gruppe-s...i was there with my cousins waiting for his 550i to be clear-bra'd by jeremy...

and its unfortunate that this happened...hope things work out for you..havent had too many installs at gruppe-s but yeah you just have to walk into the sales office (sure preston, mark or geoff would be more then willing to help)...although a nice looking secretary in the lobby would awesome too

mnavarro

Yes pretty much as I figured.... much more to the story. The guy was so unspecific about what work was supposed to be done on the car for good reason. I know Mike doesn't treat customers like that.....

ucbsti

iTrader: (9)

There has to be some sort of trade off. Unless they want to hire 2 or so more customer service reps just to sit and baby sit those in the lobby. But that will just mean higher prices. Then everyone will complain they raised there prices

y0heezee

iTrader: (16)

MIKE: 1
MATT: 0

For the stuff that Mike, Tommy and Merk go through to help everyone out is amazing. These guys stay till midnight or later, show up the next morning before 9 just to get everything done. Remember that these guys are payed on salary and not hourly. These guys bust their asses for everyone and still get hated on by people jumping on the bandwagon of bad experiences at Gruppe-S? I go into the freakin bank sometimes and get bad service. Thats just how is goes. Yeah, it's customer service, blah blah blah. Think of it this way, when you're tired or in a bad mood, are you going to go out of your way and blow sunshine up someone else ***? I sure as hell wouldn't. There's no need to send out hate posts about a company. There are better ways to deal with things than this. Mike is an awesome tuner. You should see the countless hours he spends in order to get the car running as good as it can. You should see how much time he takes out of his own life in order to finish up on the cars so that people can return to their own personal life routine. Mike and his team give up so much of their own time to satisfy their customers. Most of it is appreciated, yet some doushbags, come out and cry about how "oh, i had to wait forever" and in the same post say, "some things weren't 100% correct". how can you want something done fast and be 100% perfect? it's one or the other guys.

As far as waiting in the lobby, quite obviously, the lobby and the sales area is blocked off with only a small opening to the lobby. If you were in the sales area, you can't even see the lobby. Make your presence known. If I go into McDonalds and sit in the corner away from the ordering stand, are they going to help me out? I highly doubt it.

The guys at Gruppe-S are great guys, you should seriously see how each one of them busts their asses to satisfy their customers.




Muscles

GT35 STI

iTrader: (6)

I find it far fetched that Mike would treat a customer like that. I have dealt with Gruppe-S a lot; they installed my clutch, GT35R turbo set up, tuned my car, made a custom down pipe for the turbo kit, built my motor, and Welded on my Tial B.O.V to the char pipes. Mike even made a custom intake, where he stayed LATE into the night doing because my car was pulling timing with the MAF sensor in the engine bay. Mike has always treated me like a friend and not so much a customer, he even offered at one point to drive down the Sacramento Raceway(2hr drive or so) and do data logs on my car as I went down the track, just to make sure everything was perfect on his tune.

I am sure Mike and Gruppe-s was VERY hesitant to work on my car, considering how messed up it was prior to bringing it into them(had another shop hack job install everything, and then blow my motor). Mike did a compression/leak down test as soon as I brought it into them the first them, and well things where not good. Mike decided he would still take a look at it, and see what he could do. He turned the car from an absolute turd into the beast it is today. The car could barely drive down the street, it has now driven 4-5k miles with that SAME ****ty motor that was ruined prior to bringing it into Gruppe-s, and so far able to get the thing to go down the 1/4 mile in 11.76@120mph. When I was having over-boosting problems due to the colder weather, I sent mike an email telling him. I few hours later Mike sent me a new map, with less boost, and the thing was perfect!

When it came to my motor, which I just picked up the other day and it's damn perfect looking. At first I told mike I was going to do some crazy engine build and what not, so I waiting forever for some parts(no big deal). Then outta no where I decided I didn't wanna spend that kind of money on a motor, so I just went with their basic Stage 2 package. Mike told me it would be ready in 10 days, which it took a little longer then that(as I expected, because no shop is going to really be able to have that kind of turn around, to me 10 days was unrealistic). During this process I dealt with Preston, I would send him emails regularly just to check up on the process of the motor, because I was in sort of a rush to get it(since my motor is on it's final leg). Preston was amazing at responding to my emails, if I sent him an email it was pretty much answered within a couple hours with all the info I needed...

Now I have only dealt with those two people are gruppe-s, so maybe my experience isn't exactly a full review of how the shop performs. I have also dealt with ALOT of local shops, and I can say without any hesitation that gruppe-s is an absolutely amazing shop to bring your car to, yes they might have their "problems" but then again name me a shop who hasn't had their problems. Hell my car has had it's problems after I brought it to them. I would even call Mike when I was at the track, and he would give me advice on how to fix it while he was at the track, then would tell me to bring the car by the next day if I haven't fixed the problem yet. They have always treated me amazing, and tried to fix every problem that came with modifying a car...

My experience, I would rate gruppe-s up there with the best of them, who cares how "messed" up their lobby is, as long as they do good work. And anyone who questions what kinda work they do, has not seen a lot of the cars that have come out of that shop...


My question to you is, if you are willing to drive "600 miles".... from LA?(what back *** roads do YOU take? lol that's twice the distance it really is)... Why didn't you just bring the car to Phil@Elemental tuning? Mike told you he wasn't all the comfortable with tuning Hydra, and you basically expected him to tune the car to perfection. If you are willing to fly around, and bring the car places, I just don't see why you didn't bring it to the Hydra god?

scarface

iTrader: (3)

Serioulsy!!!!!!!! Well said man. Mike is an O.G.

Eli

Mike = 2
Matt = 0

verc

iTrader: (12)

Scarface, y0heezee, please do not defame the poster, it is distasteful.

I think a lot of people modding their cars don't know what they are getting themselves into. It is our fault sometimes. We brag and post, give advice about "You can get 400hp if you buy these cheap parts and install yourself and modify custom braket flange etc." Because the information wasn't all on the table, the guy goes and builds his project and does it wrong for a multitude of reasons. Like most people he doesn't budget enough and is left with a dilemna.

verc

iTrader: (12)

Now Matt, I understand all that I read, and I acknowledge Gruppe-S may be partly to blame, but there are some things you need to know for future reference (the next time you start a car project)

1. Whenever modifying a vehicle you should stick to a small circle of trusted, reputable shops and tuners. It is the responsibility of the tuner to guide you and advise you. I am 100 percent sure things would have gone differently if you started the project at the same shop, had Phil from Element work with it, etc. etc.

2. Expect to go overbudget by A LOT unless you 100 percent know what is going on (and only like .001 percent of us 100 percent know what's going on). Prepare yourself so you don't get into the mentality of "damn the shop ripped me off". Reputable shops don't rip you off BUT they may find more to the project than you previously thought, they may also realize the customer did not give them adequate information about the car and they no longer feel comfortable working on it. While this is unfortunate and it IS the fault of the shop for not spotting it earlier, both parties are still at fault. I think I ended up going 1500 over my expected cost of my motor build at Gruppe-S. Gee, good thing I budgeted extra.