Welcome to another edition of the Car Dealership Guy Industry Spotlight Podcast Recap—a rundown of key lessons from top operators, founders, and execs shaping the future of auto retail.
Today’s guests are Bill Camastro, dealer operator at Gold Coast Cadillac, and Derek Simmonds, EVP Automotive at Numa.
Together, they discuss how Bill handles customer complaints directly, why traditional CSI surveys miss most unhappy customers, and how faster responses can prevent people from quietly leaving the dealership for good.
Direct access to ownership creates accountability without fear.
Most dealerships create layers between customers and decision-makers, which allows problems to fester and employees to hide mistakes rather than seeking help to resolve them.
"My deal with my salespeople is this. If you read the letter to the customer... The customer, we screw up everything. And the customer calls me and I have an opportunity to resolve it, I never, ever give you a hard time and you'll never hear me speak badly about the event. The only time I get upset is if you don't read the letter and I find out later on that something went wrong." - Bill
The system works because Bill separates process compliance from outcome perfection. Employees are rewarded for transparency, not punished for customer complaints, which paradoxically improves both service quality and recovery rates.
CSI gaming destroys long-term business while protecting short-term bonuses.
Manufacturers tie significant bonus money to satisfaction scores, creating a system where dealers optimize survey responses rather than actual customer happiness, which works financially until word-of-mouth kills future business.
"In today's day and age, so many dealers out there, because there's so much back-end money from the OEMs, they work harder on the index than they do on the customer satisfaction. Wow. Very important. Dimensional view As long as I get my money. It's like robbing a bank. As long as I get my money, I'm good. But that's not true because you'll be forever chasing that." - Bill
The practice creates a perverse incentive structure where the metrics that determine manager compensation are completely divorced from the behaviors that drive sustainable business growth.
Management perpetuates broken systems because they learned them as salespeople.
Promotion from within seems logical, but it automatically replicates existing dysfunctions unless dealers actively retrain managers to abandon the tactics that got them promoted in the first place.
"The same guys and gals. That are your general managers, GSMs, and sales managers today... Same people that were selling cars 10 or 15 years ago. When their bosses were telling them, make sure you get a good survey, call and ask them for a survey, tell them we'll give them $10 for a survey, give them a touch of paint for a survey. So those people came from selling cars that way. They were rewarded by being made managers... This is how I became a manager. This is what I'm going to teach my people." - Bill
The problem is that many managers are teaching the behaviors that led to their own success, even if those behaviors are destroying the business.
Premium pricing requires premium experience, not just premium products.
Like the difference between Motel 6 and Four Seasons, dealerships that compete only on price attract price-sensitive customers, while those that deliver exceptional service can command higher margins and maintain customer loyalty.
"The Motel 6, it's a great place if that's where you want to stay. But they always tell you, we'll leave the lights on, right? They'll leave the lights on because the place isn't packed. However, you go to Four Seasons or the Ritz-Carlton, which costs infinitely more money to stay at, they're always packed. But they always make sure that they make the stay worth the money you pay. And that's what I want to make sure of in my environment." - Bill
Conquest sales based purely on low prices generate lower profits and transactional relationships, while service-based differentiation allows dealerships to maintain margins while building a loyal customer base.
Presented by:
1. Numa - Numa is the first AI agent platform for auto dealerships. Address communication breakdowns with customers and get full visibility into all service interactions. Numa answers every call, rescues and books service appointments and lets service teams see all customer communications in one place. Increase Repair Order revenue, expand your customer base and increase CSI. Visit at www.numa.com.
Responsiveness is the foundation of satisfaction and profitability.
Automotive has normalized making customers wait hours or days for responses, training buyers to expect poor service and creating a massive opportunity for dealers who simply answer quickly.
"We believe that responsiveness is the number one key to satisfaction and dollars per hour. We actually have dealer groups that are tying their pay plans to their advisors based upon their median response time and then how many status update phone calls they get. Because they've never been able to track it. And we track it now." - Derek
The competitive advantage is being the dealer who makes customers feel valued immediately, before they've contacted three other stores.
Service retention is the leading indicator of future vehicle sales.
Most dealers treat service as a separate profit center from sales, measuring each department independently and missing the connection between service loyalty and future vehicle purchases.
"We know beyond a shadow of a doubt, if you service two times a year over a 36 month period of time, you have an 80% chance that you're gonna sell that guy a car again. 80% chance you service zero in that same 36 months, you got less than a 15% chance. It's like 12 or 13%." - Derek
This data reframes every service interaction as either building or destroying the dealership's future sales pipeline, making service retention a more powerful predictor of revenue than traditional conquest marketing metrics.
Service advisors and dealer principals operate on incompatible time horizons.
Compensation structures create a fundamental misalignment where the people handling customer complaints daily are financially incentivized to avoid the difficult conversations that protect the business long-term.
"At an owner level or a general manager level, you have a longer what I call an event horizon than a service advisor. What's a service advisor's big concern? What's my paycheck going to be in two weeks when I get paid? What's my paycheck at the end of the month? And unfortunately, that creates short-term thinking and short-term behavior. And when you are scheduling two weeks out for heavy jobs because you don't have enough technicians to support where they're at, they don't care that they got an upset customer. They're just like, ‘I hope he doesn't get to my boss.’" - Derek
It’s rational behavior from overworked people optimizing for their immediate financial survival rather than the dealership's three-year customer retention strategy.
Fixed operations strength protects dealerships during variable operations downturns.
New car sales are cyclical and unpredictable, but service revenue provides the steady cash flow needed to avoid panic decisions that damage culture and long-term competitive position.
"If I can increase my fixed operations more so, which I believe I can, with tools like NUMA, with the good people and the processes we have, I mean, it just ensures my shelf life through choppy waters on the variable side... If my business and solving and we're not profitable. It makes it very difficult for me to make exceptions to the environment, if you will, for the employees or put a little pad underneath the employees if I don't have that to work with." - Bill
Strong service operations give dealers the financial flexibility to protect employee relationships during downturns rather than making cuts that destroy the culture required for recovery.
Growth mindset during uncertainty creates competitive advantage.
Market downturns reveal which dealers are running sustainable businesses versus those living deal-to-deal, with most choosing to cut expenses and consider exits rather than investing through the cycle.
"I think what gives us the real advantage is we... At least at some level. We're perpetually thinking about growth. You know, where, Times like this, the average dealer is thinking about Hey, listen, if this EB thing goes the way it's going for six months or a year. Should I sell my store? Should I cut people?" - Bill
Competitors who retreat during tough markets hand over customers and talent to dealers with the financial stability and confidence to keep investing, creating market share shifts that persist long after conditions improve.
Responsiveness is the metric that will replace traditional satisfaction scores.
Post-transaction surveys measure what already happened and can be manipulated, while response time and heat case resolution are real-time indicators of whether customers will return or defect.
"I think that that's really important because I loved how you phrased that earlier. And how do we get this moving forward? And I think that's the way that we have to do it. We have to look at it as operators and say- That's not what I want. I want to retain that customer because I want to sell them another car in three years." - Derek
The shift requires owners and GMs to override their managers' instinct to optimize for survey scores and instead build systems that measure and reward the behaviors that actually drive retention and repurchase.
