Industry leaders at the New York Auto Forum delivered a pointed message last week: Dealers have a window, most floating the year 2030 as a reference point, to strengthen their dealerships and the experience offered, so customers won't want to look elsewhere.
The details: Stewart Stropp, vice president of customer success for J.D. Power, moderated a panel on customer experience.
Featured were Liza Borches, President and CEO of Carter Myers Automotive, Rob Cochran, CEO of #1 Cochran and NADA chairman, and Jack Hollis, managing partner for Accrual Equity Partners.
As the panel chatted about customer experience, transparency, AI adoption, and the looming threat of Chinese automakers, the conversation kept returning to the same conclusion: the time to act is now.
Here's what the group had to say…
Transparency, transparency: Stropp presented J.D. Power data showing that customer satisfaction scores are higher even with lower trade-in offers, so long as dealers explain and justify the number.
The implication being that customers aren't just buying a price, they're buying a trustworthy process.
"The way to win is to make sure that customer experience is not only so good that they enjoy their vehicle, enjoy the experience, but they're telling people," Hollis said.
Hollis, a longtime top exec at Toyota, also said manufacturers should listen to what dealers need and give it to them.
The operational fix is straightforward: Train all staff to walk customers through the reasoning behind every offer, not just deliver the number and wait.
Video MPI adoption: Despite being a known best practice for years, fewer than half of premium customers and only about one in four mass-market customers are receiving photo or video evidence alongside recommended service.
Borches said one reason that number isn't higher is due to the record years dealers have celebrated. Success can sometimes become a roadblock, she said, because nobody wants to "upset the apple cart" during good times.
"When times are this good, this is when we should be creating new habits," Borches said. "This is when we need to be innovating. This is when we need to be training our teams."
The panel also flagged a process gap in which dealers measured how many videos technicians created, but not whether advisors were sending them or prepping customers to open them.
Managers can fix it by checking the full pipeline, from creation to send rate to open rate, and building advisor accountability into the process.
Using AI responsibly: Data shows that the single biggest driver of satisfaction in both sales and service is still a consultant or advisor who appears fully focused on the customer.
The panel's consensus was that AI's best near-term use case is removing administrative friction, not cutting headcount.
"Consumers would prefer to work with a human if they are efficient, effective and organized," Borches said. "If we can use AI to help our teams take all that administrative tasks off of them that create friction and allow them to then use our super power, which is creating relationships and trust, I think that's where we should start."
The panel also noted a case where staff began uploading sensitive data to outside AI models before having privacy controls in place.
Dealers without such a plan were encouraged to move quickly.
OUTSMART THE CAR MARKET IN 5 MINUTES A WEEK
Get insights trusted by 55,000+ car dealers. Free, fast, and built for automotive leaders.
Regarding Chinese cars: The panel's urgency around customer experience was tied directly to a looming competitive threat.
Hollis made the case that the current tariff and regulatory environment gives dealers a defined runway where they don't have to worry about competition from Chinese OEMs, at least for now.
"You have four years to crush back the competition," Hollis said. "The answer is today, it's customer experience and investments. It's not just a thing. It's your strategy."
Hollis argued that OEMs should be more nervous than dealers about Chinese automakers' eventual U.S. arrival, given the franchise system's built-in advantages in local relationships and service infrastructure.
The dealers who win on experience now, he said, will be the hardest to poach later.
Bottom line: The forum made clear that customer experience is no longer a soft metric. For dealers with a window before the competitive landscape shifts, it may be the most important investment they can make.
"Our single biggest advantage is the long-term relationship that we've built with customers, and that is human interaction," Cochran said. "We cannot ever lose sight of that."
A quick word from our partner
You think dealership websites are commodities.
So here’s a question:
Would you bet a 15% increase in total sales on that belief? We will.
Overfuel is setting the new technical standard for automotive websites.
When a 15-store OEM dealer group switched to Overfuel, their 60-day post-launch review reported:
+64% VDP views
-67% paid search sessions
+15.5% total sales
Proof that the website isn’t a commodity -- It’s revenue infrastructure.
