I was on a trip to New York and met up with a friend of mine (full disclosure: also a happy customer) Richard Hesse, the Dealer Principal at Mercedes-Benz of Nanuet. He has a simple mantra: “It's not business; it’s personal” -- and he means it.  I borrowed a car…

The famous Albert Mehrabian developed a communication model in which he demonstrated that only 7% of what we communicate consists of the literal content of the message. The use of one’s voice, such as tone, intonation, and volume, makes up 38% of the message and as much as 55% of communication consists of non-verbal factors such as body language.

I’m sure you can…

Not too long ago your service department could rely on seeing customers fairly frequently, but as vehicles have increased in quality, so have the OEM’s suggested service intervals – some are now as much as 15,000 miles between oil changes.

To put this into perspective, in the past, if a customer drove 15,000 miles annually they would visit the dealership on…