At Bob Poynter Family of Dealerships, Customer Experience Manager Tony Starkey is running one of the simplest systems in the store, which also happens to be one of the most profitable.
The details: On an episode of Daily Dealer Live, Starkey explained how a small three-person team calls every buyer, checks in after service, and keeps in touch for two years.
Sounds basic, but it’s turned into steady service traffic and repeat sales.
Here’s how it works: When a vehicle is sold or a repair order closes, Starkey’s team reaches out within 24 hours just to make sure everything went smoothly.
If there’s a problem, they do what they can to fix it quickly, usually before an OEM survey is sent to the customer.
From there, the follow-up process includes a mix of small, intentional touches, like every buyer getting a Yeti mug with the store’s logo.
“$23 is what it costs me to send that,” Starkey said. “It’s an impression, and our logo is in their hand every day.”
The team also sends out free car wash vouchers through the service department and $10 service gift cards from the service manager.
“Little things make big differences,” he said, adding that those $10 gift cards alone have generated 261 redemptions and roughly $146,000 in repair orders.
For context: Across the group’s Chevrolet-Buick-GMC, CDJR, and Ford stores, the team touches roughly 360 sales and more than 2,000 repair orders each month. And despite that volume, the process Starkey described has been running for more than a decade, still entirely manual.
“AI's great, don't get me wrong, and automation is great, but you don't get that personal touch when you actually have a real person calling you and talking to you,” Starkey said. “It means a lot. And we get so much response from customers saying, ‘Thank you for your follow-up.’”
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Why this matters: That personal touch is exactly why he formed this follow-up process in the first place.
Because when he joined Bob Poynter 14 years ago to handle marketing, he immediately noticed that there was plenty of attention to customer experience before the sale, but not enough after.
That’s why he pitched the idea of creating a department focused entirely on this problem.
As he told it: “The owner said, ‘Whatever you think you need to do, do it,’” he said. “Now, our repeat business is second to none.”
Bottom line: Dealers love to talk about lead gen, SEO, and ad budgets. And while it’s always exciting to see how AI is helping stores improve those tactics, it’s also nice to hear that the basics (picking up the phone, saying thank you, and following up for two years straight) still work when executed well.
“It’s five times more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to retain the one you have,” Starkey said. “If you’re not spending your focus on customer experience after the sale, you’re missing the boat.”
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