Problem
Manuel Ortiz is the owner and operator of Futura Motors, a large automobile and small-truck dealership in Toronto, Ontario. The dealership represents several Japanese and Korean vehicle manufacturers. For more than a decade, Ortiz and his management team have invested time, effort, and money into building culturally diverse sales and service staffs to better serve the many ethnic, cultural, and racial groups that make up the dealership's customer base. Ortiz brags that in total his sales staff speaks 13 different languages. "In this way we can communicate in the native tongue of almost any customer or sales prospect that shows up on the floor," says Ortiz. (A sales prospect is anyone who visits Futura without the full intention of purchasing a vehicle from the dealership, including the people who are "just looking.")
The culturally diverse sales and service staffs apparently have contributed to the growth and profitability of Futura, although such an assertion would be difficult to prove. For example, Ortiz has not been able to compare the dollar volume of Futura to a comparable size foreign dealership in Brooklyn that has a more homogeneous workforce.
Penny Shakelford, the office manager at Futura, has recently brought a potential problem to Ortiz's attention that has caused him some concern about how well he and his staff are managing diversity. According to Shakelford, the multicultural sales staff appears to be well accepted by most customers and prospects, yet some problems are surfacing. Based on direct concerns expressed by both customers and prospects, Shakelford believes that they are being patronized on the basis of their demographic group. She explains:
"My impression is that some customers think we are bending over backwards to make them feel at home. If a person who walks on the floor appears to be an African American, immediately an African American sales rep walks up to him or her. The same goes for several other visible ethnic or racial groups. Two different Asiatic Indians wrote down on customer service survey cards that they thought it was too obvious that an Indian rushed out on the floor as soon as they appeared. A Spanish Canadian woman said she thought it was a little bit much that three minutes after she and her husband walked into the dealership, a young sales rep introduced himself in Spanish. The customer said she was in Toronto, not Madrid, and wanted to be treated like a Canadian."
Ortiz said that it appears that the vast majority of customers and prospects find no problem with our attempt to make a direct appeal to their racial or ethnic group but that maybe some adjustment needs to be made. "We need to give this problem some thought. We don't want to insult anybody, but neither do we want to lose our competitive edge of having a multicultural workforce," Ortiz said.
• What recommendations would you make to Ortiz and his management team about the several complaints the Futura dealership has received? What is your critical appraisal of the merits of the complaints Futura has received? Are they justified?